Welcome to the Colette Podcast. My name is Claire Lehman and I am editor and chief of Colette.

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Hi, my name's Toby Young and I'm one of Quillett's London-based editors.

A year ago I spoke to Douglas Murray on the publication of his book The Madness of Crowds, which sought to explain the resurgence of identity

politics, particularly in the Anglosphere. And he has kindly agreed to speak to me again to coincide

with the publication of the paperback.

Douglas, welcome to the Colette Podcast.

Very nice to be back.

In the new afterworld of the book,

you begin on a fairly optimistic note saying that the book's reception was more courteous

than you'd expected it to be. You didn't suddenly find yourself cancelled. But you end on a pretty gloomy note saying that your hopes have been dashed and we now appear to be rushing head long into an identitarian dystopia.

What happened in the past year to change your mind about that?

What hasn't happened in the last year when we were gathered last year if one of us had said to the other that we spend much of 2020 locked in our houses at the insistence

of the Conservative majority government and that anyone who was young and not in a committed relationship

would be forced into celibacy by Boris Johnson.

You might have wondered what the circumstances were.

...