David Wilson

I’m on tour at the moment with the novelist Marcel Theroux, who surprised and delighted me the other day by commenting in our shared dressing room “oh, you smell nice” and then asking “what’s your cologne?” Let’s leave aside the cultural changes that have occurred over time to allow one man to ask another about what aftershave they might be using and instead think about smell more generally, and how it might specifically relate to crime.

Ours is a culture dominated by two central forces – narcissism and a sense of identity which has become focussed on victimhood.

Do these attempts on these lives of Trump and Fico suggest something broader about Western culture and the nature of political debate in the mid 2020s?

In his latest book, the Anglo-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie recounts in unflinching detail what happened to him as he was about to start a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York, on August 12, 2022.

It was over a decade ago that someone new came into my life – a stalker. At first I didn’t know that that was what he was, but I soon became uncomfortable when I saw him following me about on campus, staring at me in the refectory, and turning up at my lectures, even though he was not enrolled on the course that I taught.

I’ve never needed to be convinced that miscarriages of justice happen in Scotland.

Who do people want to believe conspiracy theories such as the one about Sandy Hook?

Let’s think about the obstacles to getting justice in Scotland. A recent and very readable discussion paper called Access to Justice for Everyone, produced by the Scottish Human Rights Commission, identified four man barriers that blocked people getting justice: a lack of awareness of rights; a lack of legal, financial and emotional resources; the complexity of different complaints procedures; and weak mechanisms to promote system-level learning from past mistakes and violations.

The New York Post was almost breathless in its reporting. “Move over, Ted Bundy”, it suggested, there’s a “new-old serial hottie in town”. This extraordinary article accompanied an AI-generated image of Jack the Ripper, which was recently created by a Welshman called Jeff Leahy.

Mark Chapman was sentenced to 20 years for killing John Lennon in December 1980 outside of The Dakota - the Upper West Side apartment buildings where the former Beatle lived with his wife Yoko Ono and Sean, their five-year old son – by shooting him four times in the back, as Lennon walked into the building.