Welcome to new subscribers

...About 500 of you if Substack got its sums right

Last week, Substack featured Not on Your Team, But Always Fair on its homepage.

This meant about 500 new free subscribers turned up over the next few days, along with four more new paid subscribers. Welcome, I hope you like what you see.

I’m now about 15 subscribers away from three thousand, which—given Twitter’s throttling of Substack links over the last couple of months—has meant I’ve caught up on the subscription gains I used to be able to get because I have a large-ish Twitter account (about 40K followers).

To that end, I’d better tell you what you’re getting.

First and most important, this Substack is unpaywalled. I’m vain enough to think that the writing around here is good enough to mean people are willing to pay for it without a promise of exclusivity. I don’t pay myself, but I do pay my writers, of whom the most important is Lorenzo Warby.

Lorenzo has his own Substack (

Lorenzo from Oz

), but I have a much larger, ready-made audience. There are historical reasons for this.

Many years ago, both Lorenzo and I were on the receiving end of cancellations. The one directed at Lorenzo succeeded, and he was driven out of public life. The one directed at me failed, making me more popular than ever.

Much of the difference in outcomes turned on my social class and access to connections, and I tried over a number of years to figure out how to reintroduce Lorenzo to public life and commentary. This included him writing for a blog I ran, and promoting his blog using my big Twitter account. Neither of those succeeded.

Substack, however, has worked. I have been able to use my reach to get his work out to a bigger audience, and my connections to get it noticed more widely.

This means, if you subscribe, you’re paying for Lorenzo’s series of essays on the strange and disorienting times in which we live. Links to all essays published so far (about half of them) are under my pinned post, and I’ve highlighted it with Substack’s official “elephant stamp” of quality.

In my view, Lorenzo is a major thinker and scholar, and if I achieve nothing more than getting his work in front of tens of thousands of eyeballs, this Substack will be a resounding success.

As for me, I’ve been a writer in a variety of outlets since 1993, and in various forms of legal practice since 2005. I’ve written three novels (the second’s cover is my logo), hundreds of thousands of words of legal and political commentary, and have been Senior Writer at Law & Liberty since January 2021. Unusually, I’m trained in both English-derived common law and Roman-derived civil law. If I occasionally disappear, it’s because I’m consulting.

The illustrations scattered throughout this piece are by brilliant Scottish illustrator and photographer Terry Rodgers, and appear in my second and third novels, which form a two book series. If you buy the ebooks on Kindle or Apple, or in print in Australia, they’re in colour. If you buy the print books elsewhere, they’re in black & white.

I have won or been shortlisted for a number of literary awards, initially in Australia and then elsewhere. One of the Australian awards (the Miles Franklin Award, Australia’s equivalent of the Booker or Pulitzer) led to an attempted cancellation. As I mentioned above, this didn’t work, turning my first novel into a bestseller instead.

Kingdom of the Wicked (I and II) imagines what the world would look like if the Ancient Romans had undergone an industrial revolution. Thanks to the necessary legal and language training, I was able to preserve their distinctive, non-Christian morality: sexual perversion, eugenics, inequality of persons—the lot.

I now live in the UK, in an area often described as the “Home Counties” or “Tory Shires”. Although I’m technically retired, I still write, and hold a fractional appointment with US educational foundation Liberty Fund.

Recent things (as in, the last week) I’ve done for them include this piece on affirmative action and other unmeritorious university admissions (which look baffling to non-Americans) and this podcast interview with Douglas Murray. In it, Murray and I discuss the emergence of anti-white racism, the moral complexity of reparations, and what lessons Nietzsche has for us now.

If you’re looking for a “highlights reel”, the most popular piece (approx. 12K views) is this piece of mine on the Roman law of slavery. The most commented on is this piece on Matt Walsh’s film, What is a Woman?.

In Substack’s “categories”, I selected “politics” and “culture”. Both Lorenzo and I try to interpret those categories widely, and because we emerge from distinctive political traditions (English Toryism and Australian democratic majoritarianism), you may find us passing strange. Persist. Things that taste odd at first can become a favourite food.