Tazmamart was a place of darkness and banishment: not only were inmates cut off from their families and lovers; they were exiles from history. Aziz BineBine recalls a couplet from ‘Recueillement’ in...
In the face of climate change, the long run – which remains the sacred temporality of economics – is a misleading guide not only to current affairs, but to the long run itself. There is no reason to...
A lot may depend on who succeeds Johnson as party leader. In any case, it’s a fair bet that ‘Boris’, the beneficiaries of his patronage and his media cheerleaders will come to be seen as symbolic...
Carlos Ghosn’s story might not offer quite the deranged immediacy of watching John DeLorean agree on camera to transport $24 million worth of cocaine in order to get his beleaguered factory out of a...
For the new conservatism, crises arise from disorder, not from a wrong order, and their handling should be entrusted to technicians in command of special knowledge, whether scientific or magical, or both...
So what’s it like in there, the drum-bearer asked me when we reached the gates of the delegates-only COP26 Blue Zone, thickly fenced behind rows of anti-ram-raid bollards, with the nearby drains and...
Along with Mitt Romney, Adam Kinzinger and the never-Trumpers of the Lincoln Project, Liz Cheney is one of the last standard-bearers of a Republican conservatism grounded in some version of rationality....
There are a lot of apparently bullshit things in The Bidens, but it’s hard to see them as actually criminal or even especially outrageous once you accept that a politician’s family will trade on his...
Nigeria pumps out 1.5 million barrels of oil a day, making it the biggest producer on the continent. The multinationals – Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell et al – in partnership with local firms and the...
It’s striking how many times, in the past few months, Putin has been accused of being behind the transport of migrants from the Middle East to the borders of the EU through Belarus, and, separately,...
The UK has the third largest lobbying industry in the world. When ministers and prime ministers with no experience in corporate governance retire into jobs in sectors they were once supposed to regulate,...
A successful candidate will need to offer stability after years of upheaval and division, but there is an obvious tension between stability and the politics of radical change. It remains to be seen how...
Where money didn’t exist, it had to be created, and this was done by credit banks with the help of government muscle: the state imposed the legal tender issued by the banks. Of course, money already...
The CIA equipped and paid Central American rebels, and hired US mercenaries to fly bombers over Guatemala City, dropping first leaflets then bombs, while the US navy blockaded the coast. The coup could...
The Empire Windrush, bringing eight hundred Caribbean passengers to Britain, docked at Tilbury on 21 June 1948, while the Nationality Act was still going through Parliament. Here again, myth has fogged...
Thinking is what Arendt probably claimed to have been spending whole days doing: ‘the two in one’, ‘the soundless dialogue ... between me and myself’. She would be thinking, and she would be smoking;...
Each time I return to Amman I am struck by the confidence with which younger members of Jordan’s queer community assert themselves, and the fearlessness – or innocence? – of their drive for visibility....
The many young economists who devoted themselves to preventing shock therapy fell from power in 1989 when Zhao Ziyang was ousted: like Zhao, their support for the Tiananmen Square protesters had political...