How did Pakistan become the world’s leading nuclear proliferator? North Korea, Libya, Iran: none of them would have worked on building a bomb if it hadn’t been for A.Q. Khan,...
The definition of Conservative policy, according to Lord Salisbury, was the preaching of ‘confidence’: the ‘provision of work … will only exist where confidence...
The key to Macron’s poor performance in May is that two years after his election, many in France – and increasingly in Europe – consider his self-styled progressive identity to be at odds with his...
The Brexit Party is a mixture of business startup and social movement; it serves as a pressure valve, releasing pent-up frustration with traditional politics into the electoral system.
Wanting to be Margaret Thatcher is tempting some prime ministerial hopefuls to flirt with being Donald Trump. Trying to be Trump is likely to mean that they end up as Theresa May: full of purpose, empty...
The horrors of IS rule are well known: the killings of Shia; the choice offered to the Christians of Mosul (conversion, ruinous taxation or expulsion); the slaughter of polytheists; the revival of slavery;...
Who today remembers the Helsinki conference? Unlike other major international gatherings like the Congress of Vienna or the Paris Peace Conference, Helsinki, which concluded in 1975 after...
That Narendra Modi’s party would win again was never really in dispute. The only question was whether the BJP (the Bharatiya Janata, or Indian Peoples’ Party), would emerge merely...
You can see the twin slagheaps from almost every corner of the battlefield. If there is one memorable emblem of the Battle of Loos, it is these double crassiers, a little altered in outline...
Perhaps the deepest irony of all is that in clearing Trump of conspiracy the Mueller report poses a direct challenge to his worldview.
‘There is a France only thanks to the state,’ Charles de Gaulle declared in 1960, ‘and only by the state can France be maintained.’ He spoke these words during the...
They do not all look the same. But group them together and they clearly form a political family: Orbán, Erdoğan, Kaczyński, Trump, Modi, perhaps Netanyahu, Bolsonaro for sure. It...
Where is trauma meant to lodge itself when the mind, like the body, in shreds or shot to pieces, is no longer anything that might remotely be called home?
Who began the killing? At root, arguments about the genesis of the Troubles are arguments about responsibility for murder, and that’s one reason it has proved so hard to disentangle...
Public land became surplus as the result of the state’s determination to shrink itself. At the heart of this project lay a brazen deceit.
Not much has stuck with me from my two years studying politics at A-Level. The word ‘quango’ and what it stands for (quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation). And the couple...
On 10 December last year, 15 men and women were found guilty of ‘endangering safety’ at Stansted Airport by ‘means of a device or substance’. The offence was created in...
At 35 per cent, the turnout for Nigeria’s general election in February was the lowest since democracy succeeded military rule twenty years ago. During the three weeks I spent on the road...