British GQ March 2021

Joe Biden certainly understands the nature of the hurdles in front of him. Since his election victory in November, which was officially confirmed the following month, Biden has struck the right note every time his country has needed him to. Not by calling for the defenestration of Trump and not by waving pieces of paper, threatening force or through political rhetoric. No, the 46th president of the United States has worked his way into the news feeds largely by being calm and collected. He, at least, knows the way forward right now involves the most fragile volte-face in US political history. Of course, it wasn’t meant to be this way, but then liberal America has been saying this for more than four years now. Belonging to a country that was having…

Martha Gill As City Hall “downsizes”, GQ contributor and former lobby journalist Martha Gill reported on the sense of decline and atrophy that has blighted the last two years of Sadiq Khan’s first term as London mayor. “While researching this piece, two things struck me,” says Gill. “As mayor, Khan has been uniquely unlucky. And he has never failed to make his bad luck worse.” Howie Kahn As the world locked down last year, US art galleries had to find a new way to reach their clientele as the rich fled New York City. The answer, as Howie Kahn writes, was to open branches in the Hamptons. “Every business has done what it must to endure during Covid-19,” says Kahn. “I only wish the public could take home what these galleries sell: art…

Periods of strife invariably spawn moments of prosperity. In response to the horrors of the Great War, for instance, the bright young things of the Western hemisphere partied relentlessly, listening to jazz, dressing as flappers, drinking Gin Rickeys, all the while investing in status automobiles and electric Tiffany lamps. The period became known, of course, as the Roaring Twenties. The US became the planet’s greatest economic power and its allies, we Britons included, benefited wildly from its success. A similar story unfolded after the Second World War. The 1950s was a decade so prosperous that the world and his wife started procreating on a scale never before seen in modern times: an over-sexed two-fingers-up to the miseries precipitated by the biggest and deadliest conflict in recorded human history. Here’s a bullish prediction:…

Out on the wilder shores of the manosphere, they talk constantly about the red pill and the blue pill. Derived from a scene in The Matrix, taking the blue pill lets you live your life in blissful ignorance of the monstrous reality of the wicked world, while necking the red pill opens your eyes to reveal the awful truth. Dream world or real world: it’s your choice. As rebel leader Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) explained it to Neo (Keanu Reeves) in 1999, “You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” But out in the manosphere – far too often a digital…

One of the most bankable genres in publishing these days is what’s called “smart thinking”. In a dumbed-down world, what could be more attractive? Yet, whenever I hear someone pitching a “smart thinking” book I’m reminded of that pert saying of Mrs Thatcher: “If you have to tell someone you’re a lady, you’re not.” The original “smart thinking” books started as an amalgam of business-motivational stuff, self-help and pop sociology. Their basic gimmick was, in the manner of Malcolm Gladwell, to take one big idea and arrange the world around it. They sold like hot cakes. We’re now, as a result, witnessing the “smart-thinkification” of almost everything. Have you ever wished you could get a handle on the profoundest insights into the laws of the universe – how black holes die; why…

Now that the days are getting longer, the sun’s a little stronger and the Covid vaccine is finally on the way, it’s time to invest in a pair of life-enhancing sunglasses that will vastly improve your world view just in time for the spring. Inspired by classic aviator styles from the 1970s, the new breed of oversized, soft-lensed shades doing the rounds right now are designed to make everything look that little bit better. What’s more, the sepia-toned lenses of those at Dolce & Gabbana, Tom Ford, Gucci and Ray-Ban will work excellently with the two biggest trends of the season, namely utility (oversized taupe safari jackets, roomy trench coats and multipocketed cargo pants) and ton-sur-ton (camel suits teamed with stone rollnecks and buff overcoats), meaning you’ll look every bit…