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...
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...
We need to know not just what kind of past the Brexiteers imagine, but what kind of future they are after.
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...
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...
‘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...
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 (
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...
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...
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...
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....
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...
There’s something really wonderful, and also very funny, about Beveridge’s hubris. It’s rather as if, today, an official were asked to propose a national transport policy and took as an ‘assumption’...
The problem isn’t the laws as such, but their enforcement. The EU’s limit for nitrogen dioxide is 40 micrograms per cubic metre of air. In 2016, levels in Oxford Street averaged more than twice that...
We hate to be brought face to face with the fact that Western soldiers, poorly led and operating in a climate of endemic racial contempt, are capable of acting as appallingly as the Germans who murdered...
Surely it’s time for the authentically middle-aged – we know who we are: square, clapped out, disillusioned and cardiganed – to take charge before the inheritance is squandered?
The VIX, or Volatility Index, is Wall Street’s fear gauge. I first started paying attention to it in the late 1990s. Back then, a level of around 20 seemed normal. If the index got to...
More than a quarter of a century has elapsed since the Cold War ended and the surprise is that few historians have yet attempted to analyse it from start to finish, even though for two...