Where to begin? After Boko Haram

Adewale Maja-Pearce, 26 April 2018

Whatever becomes of Boko Haram, a greater threat to stability in the country as a whole, not just the north, has begun to emerge: a group known to Nigerians as ‘Fulani herdsmen’.

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If​ 2016 was the year of the crime, then 2017 was dominated by the police investigation. In the eyes of most commentators, there were two prime suspects: the responsibility for the Brexit vote...

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The Great Sorting: Urban Inequality

Ben Rogers, 26 April 2018

Richard Florida​ has been having second thoughts. In 2002 he argued in The Rise of the Creative Class that the future of advanced economies lay not in manufacturing but in high-skilled areas of...

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When​ I first visited Kurdish-held territory in northern Syria, early in 2015, it was rapidly expanding. With the help of massive US air-power, the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG)...

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On Strike

Malcolm Gaskill, 5 April 2018

The university strikes​ reached the end of their fourth week just before the start of the Easter break. More than a million students at 65 universities had been affected and, according to the...

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How to Solve the Puzzle: On Short Selling

Donald MacKenzie, 5 April 2018

It’s hard sometimes not to think that most short sellers would have become richer, worked less hard, and suffered less psychological pressure, if they had chosen a career in conventional investment...

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NHS SOS

James Meek, 5 April 2018

In the year of its seventieth anniversary, the 1.3 million people who work for the National Health Service in England find themselves in a surreal situation. They’re effectively working within two realities...

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Diary: The Bomb in My Head

Thomas Jones, 5 April 2018

It does, or it should, beggar belief that there’s a 750-acre restricted site – or ‘centre of excellence’, as AWE’s website calls it – dedicated to the development and manufacture of the most...

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We need to know not just what kind of past the Brexiteers imagine, but what kind of future they are after.

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Into the Woods: The Italian Election

Thomas Jones, 8 March 2018

Jean-Claude Juncker was reported as saying that ‘we must prepare for the worst scenario,’ by which he meant Italy having ‘no operational government’. I can think of several scenarios a lot worse...

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Diary: Breakdown in Power-Sharing

Susan McKay, 8 March 2018

The​ latest talks aimed at restoring devolved rule to Northern Ireland have failed. Arlene Foster, the leader of the Democratic Unionist Party and first minister of Northern Ireland when the...

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‘Corbyn​ and the Commie Spy’ was the Sun’s front-page splash on 15 February: ‘Shock Claims in Secret File’, the strapline read, with a hammer and sickle at either...

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Men He Could Trust: Hitler’s Stormtroopers

Richard J. Evans, 22 February 2018

When​ the International Military Tribunal convened at Nuremberg shortly after the end of the Second World War, one of the many objects of its attention were the Storm Divisions (

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Relations between the anointed ‘representative’ writer and those who are denied this privilege by white gatekeepers are notoriously prickly. Coates, a self-made writer, is particularly vulnerable...

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On the night flight​ down from Kuwait, along the Saudi coast past Bahrain, Qatar and the UAE, a seafront once dotted with tiny fishing villages glitters like a string of pearls. Needle-thin...

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Short Cuts: At the Ladbroke Arms

Inigo Thomas, 22 February 2018

The Ladbroke Arms​ is a pub in Notting Hill known for years as the policemen’s pub. The explanation is obvious: over the road is the local police station. Two decades ago, if you went for...

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Pop your own abscess: Definitions of Poverty

Rory Scothorne, 22 February 2018

Two years ago​ a woman from Dewsbury called Claire Skipper, suffering from toothache, went into her garden shed, clamped the offending tooth in a pair of pliers, and pulled. Her tooth broke....

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For​ close to half a century, Arthur Schlesinger Jr was perhaps the most recognisable liberal intellectual in America. With his tortoiseshell glasses, bow ties, and neatly stencilled hair, he...

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