One can fly to Japan from anywhere, but from Japan one can only fly to the Third World, and it hardly matters whether one lands in Kinshasa, London, New York or Zurich: they are all places...
When the Chinese e-commerce platform Alibaba, the biggest retailer in the world, launched an app allowing its customers to buy products and transfer money instantaneously, it understood that...
Two years into the Trump presidency, it is a gross exaggeration to talk of an end to the American world order. The two pillars of its global power – military and financial – are still firmly in place....
Chris Mullin’s A Very British Coup was a nostalgic book that turned into a prophetic one. First published in 1982 and set towards the end of that decade, it nonetheless recalled...
As the case of the missing students became international news, parents and activists went looking. They found first one mass grave, then another and another and another. Not their children’s. Other...
Behind all the distorted coverage, it seems to me, is an exoticising assumption: they’ll never be quite like us, though they deserve extravagant praise for trying. But Saudi Arabia is a country like...
They first came together beyond the margins of the major cities, in rural areas and small towns with rundown services, low-wage economies and dwindling commerce. Among them are people who grew up in city...
The Saillans Spring began in 2011 when residents heard that their mayor had proposed to a supermarket chain that it open a branch on the outskirts of the village, in the Drôme department...
If you are able to name the last four leaders of the United Kingdom Independence Party, then you really ought to get out more. And no, none of them was or is Nigel Farage, although of the ten...
More than a million migrants crossed the Mediterranean during the refugee crisis of 2015, with about 850,000 landing in Greece and the remainder in Italy. By March 2016 the EU had signed an...
The question remains whether the citizenry – between 35 and 40 per cent of eligible voters – who register across-the-board approval of Trump will accept the removal of a president solely on the grounds...
What is a Gavin Shuker? Most of the time, it isn’t necessary to know, unless you live in the Luton South constituency. If you don’t live there, even if you’re a Labour voter,...
About half of all buying and selling on many of the world’s crucial financial markets is now automated high-frequency trading. HFT is ultrafast. Whenever I speak to someone who might...
It’s not 1940. Might it, though, be 1945? By that I don’t mean we are at the end of some epic contest of national survival, let alone of national liberation. It’s not been...
On 23 January, Jacob Rees-Mogg reintroduced the country to the concept of prorogation – the suspension of Parliament by the monarch. Like Boris Johnson, Rees-Mogg is fond of bogus...
On 23 January – the anniversary of a revolt that toppled the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez in 1958 – the head of Venezuela’s National Assembly, Juan...
I associate my Remain vote with my tendency to claustrophobia: I like to know how I can get out. I give sleeping bags a wide berth, potholing I try hard not to think about. I prefer an aisle seat on the...
Kleptocracy works like this: steal, launder, spend. Developing and post-Soviet countries are where most of the money is stolen, but it is here in the UK and in other apparently clean and well-governed...