Big Man to Uncle Joe: The Big Three

Max Hastings, 22 November 2018

Winston Churchill​ was the dominant personality on the allied side in the Second World War: not the leader of the most important belligerent, nor even the most influential warlord in the Grand...

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Short Cuts: Black History

Sadiah Qureshi, 22 November 2018

On 22 October,​ Olivette Otele – a scholar of British and French colonialism who teaches at Bath Spa University – became the first black woman to be appointed to a chair in...

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The US is not Hungary: The Midterms

David Runciman, 22 November 2018

Many​ political scientists were utterly confounded when Trump won the presidency in 2016. A large number had staked their professional reputations on confident predictions that Hillary Clinton...

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The pervasiveness of violence among lawmakers will surprise even specialists in 19th-century American history. From the mid-1830s to the outbreak of war in 1861, Joanne Freeman counts more than seventy...

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Profits Now, Costs Later: Mariana Mazzucato

David Woodruff, 22 November 2018

Back in​ 2004, when he was riding high, before the collapse of the venerable retailer BHS in 2015 and his recent naming in the House of Lords by the Labour peer Peter Hain as a ‘powerful...

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Against Responsibility

William Davies, 8 November 2018

The phrase​ ‘hard-working families’, a staple of New Labour and Conservative rhetoric for about twenty years, fell by the wayside with the political upheavals of Jeremy...

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What would it be like?

Swati Dhingra and Josh De Lyon, 8 November 2018

Regulation and laws: In the event of No Deal, MPs will have to pass between eight hundred and a thousand new statutory instruments through Parliament in a matter of days.

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In​ the 2014 independence referendum in Scotland, prudence, self-interest and the ministrations of Project Fear kept the Scottish electorate from succumbing to the over-optimistic prospectus...

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Prospects for Ambazonia

Adéwálé Májà-Pearce, 25 October 2018

On 5​ January this year, Nigerian security operatives abducted 12 men from a hotel in Abuja, the federal capital. All were members of the self-styled government of the Republic of Ambazonia,...

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Bait and Switch: The Global Financial Crisis

Simon Wren-Lewis, 25 October 2018

In​ 2007, Alan Greenspan, the former chair of the Federal Reserve, was asked by a Swiss newspaper which presidential candidate he was supporting. He said it didn’t matter: ‘We are...

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Ten Typical Days in Trump’s America

Eliot Weinberger, 25 October 2018

President Trump says: ‘I hope to be able to put this up as one of my crowning achievements that I was able to expose something that is truly a cancer in our country.’ He is referring to the FBI.

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Spying on Writers

Christian Lorentzen, 11 October 2018

How many​ living novelists does the FBI keep files on? Is there a filing cabinet in Washington that contains a rundown of Jonathan Franzen’s feud with Oprah Winfrey? Do the Feds keep...

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Reckless, hypocritical, deluded, mendacious and chauvinist as they are, the Brexiteers found a real set of circumstances, and misapplied a popular, off-the-shelf folk myth to it. By simply rejecting the...

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What’s Missing: Tawney, Polanyi, Thompson

Katrina Navickas, 11 October 2018

Capitalism​ is in crisis, again. Inequality, measured in wages, wealth distribution, employment, ‘affordable’ housing, has become the dominant framework for understanding the...

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The template for this presidency is reality television. The lead character is playing a part that depends on his own words and actions and yet is entirely contrived. The drama is organised around a series...

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Whatever the Cost: ‘The Greek Spring’

James Angelos, 27 September 2018

On the night​ of 3 July 2015, Alexis Tsipras, prime minister of Greece and leader of the Coalition of the Radical Left, or Syriza, addressed a large crowd that had gathered in front of the...

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Corbyn Now

Lorna Finlayson, 27 September 2018

The significance of Corbynism has less to do with Corbyn or his politics than with what it discloses about the political system in which we live, widening an already growing gap between the reality of...

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Short Cuts: Canberra’s Coups

Philippa Hetherington, 27 September 2018

Shaded​ by eucalyptus and dotted with masticating kangaroos, Canberra is an unlikely contender for ‘coup capital of the world’. But the Australian capital has seen five prime...

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