What is it that is coming to a close? This fourteen-year fever dream of failures, absurdities and outbursts of reaction defies the neat periodisation or symbolisation with which the Thatcher and Blair...

For his part, Saddam Hussein believed that the CIA knew full well his weapons store was empty – which meant he was the subject of yet another conspiracy. Experience had taught him that was usually the...

The Scottish independence movement may not have been as transformative as its supporters hoped, but it was, for a time, genuinely exciting. It raised the political stakes, insisting that those who wanted...

Despite its significance, the 1924 government has not been remembered fondly, even by Labour supporters, and its leading figures have been forgotten, or, in the case of the party’s first prime minister,...

Thatcherism degraded the social fabric to the point where the Tory Party was removed from office in 1997 on a wave of discontent. Thatcherism in its second guise – represented finally by Sunak announcing...

Democracies implode when the authoritarian tendencies of the leaders of mainstream political parties are not reined in by constitutional mechanisms that are supposed to impose checks. 

The slippage between Tata and India speaks not just to Tata’s central place in the development of Indian capitalism but also to the way in which the corporation has variously come to represent progress,...

Samuel Moyn doesn’t really believe that his four Cold War liberals (Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, Lionel Trilling and Judith Shklar), much less all those to whom that label might conceivably be applied,...

Hunt’s detachment from the catastrophe in local government is symptomatic of an odd doubleness that afflicts British politics, a refusal to acknowledge the yawning gap between the country as it actually...

China’s sheer size, and the revival of decentralised decision-making since the early post-Mao decades, means that a great deal of economic statecraft occurs at lower levels: provinces, cities, districts,...

There were strong currents of populist ‘anti-globalism’ in the interwar years and plenty of political leaders eager to whip up feeling for nationalist and often nefarious ends. But the 1920s were different...

 ‘Make Hungary Great Again’ is an effective summation of Orbánism; many Hungarians would like back the tracts of territory lost with the collapse of the Habsburg Empire at the end of the First World...

Using the judiciary to lock up Imran Khan on trivialities, technicalities and a treason charge had only one purpose: to keep him out of the picture.

Trump’s misdeeds have been amply documented through two impeachment proceedings, extensive congressional investigations, Mueller’s final report and endless news coverage. Perhaps the liberal principle...

The peculiarities of the British constitution mean that it requires the combined input of the disciplines of law, politics and history – each with its own priorities, sensitivities and hinterlands of...

Populists, whether on the right or the left, have not yet got the world they want. The decade that started with the Arab Spring ended with tawdry insurrectionists high on conspiracy theories storming the...

Denial in Israel is a means of keeping supporters abroad on message. We in the Global North need lies so that we can continue to see our support for Israeli action as morally possible.

With the exception of a brief threat to the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, in November 2021, the war was only of interest to a few specialist staff at foreign ministries. The idea that there are ‘forgotten’...