The Broadsheet

Once the beating heart of intellectual London, the drawing-room salon has surrendered to the algorithm. In this dispatch, I trace the slow dissolution of a tradition that shaped three centuries of Western thought — and ask who, if anyone, is keeping the flame.

Every government builds in the image of its ambition. The concrete towers of postwar Britain were not accidents of taste — they were manifestos poured in aggregate. What does it mean when those manifestos begin to crumble?

The great paradox of the information century is that we have never been more articulate, and never had less to say. The essay as form demands patience — a currency now traded at a loss. Yet here we persist, sentence by sentence, against the current.