The New Dark Age

A Telegraph Best Books of 2026 so far

“A bracing manifesto for adhering to intellectual virtues and avoiding intellectual vices.”
The Critic

”[Biggar] fights back with the scholar’s ultimate weapon — rigorous stuy…. [His] warnings must be heeded.”
David Willetts, Financial Times

“His latest book displays many of the qualities that have made him so effective a campaigner. Its writing is plain and vigorous. It presses its claims doggedly but without a hint of malice. Its prejudices, which are many, are all on its sleeve.”
The Spectator

“An illuminating exposé of the shabby intellectual tactics of modern-day academia, from a principled man who has been at the sharp end, and kept his wits about him to tell the tale later.”
Kathleen Stock, author of Material Girls

“A trumpet-call at a time when many people sense that they can no longer openly express their views about society, Nigel Biggar’s new book brilliantly exposes the closing of minds in national institutions such as universities, making an irrefutable case that those who disagree with an often irrational consensus have every right to state their opinions without being bullied or cancelled.”
David Abulafia, University of Cambridge

“In this hard-hitting, revelatory book Nigel Biggar shows how far universities have strayed from unfettered inquiry and respect for truth. This is much more than an anti-woke polemic. By analysing in rigorous detail the evasions and distortions of his critics, he reminds us of the freedom of mind we have lost, and need to regain.”
John Gray, author of The New Leviathans: Thoughts after Liberalism

“Clear, well-researched and useful […] it’s hard to put this book down without a new desire that institutions would wake up and remember that they’re supposed to be committed to the collective pursuit of truth.”
Nina Power, The Telegraph

“Powerful”
Nick Spencer, Church Times

“Startling”
New English Review

“His main argument is simple and direct: the ‘woke,’ or ‘progressive,’ left poses a direct threat to open societies, and must be stopped through a recommitment to the ideals of liberalism, particularly in universities.”
National Review

“indispensable”
Claire Fox, The House

“Startling”
Theodore Dalrymple, New English Review

“a stirring appeal for the reunification of the true and the good in our universities”
First Things

“Nigel Biggar has become a flinty fixture of the public arena, and his conservatism has made him a bête noire of the Left.”
The Telegraph

Nigel Biggar is Emeritus Regius Professor of Moral Theology at the University of Oxford, where he led the ‘Ethics and Empire’ research project. ‘One of the leading living Western ethicists’, according to the New Statesman, he was named one of Prospect magazine’s Top Thinkers of 2024 and appointed Commander of the British Empire ‘for services to higher education’ in 2021. In 2025, he entered the House of Lords as a Conservative peer. A regular speaker and columnist throughout the English-speaking world, he is author of the bestselling Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (2023) and Reparations: Slavery and the Tyranny of Imaginary Guilt (2025).

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