Catharine MacKinnon does ask why the treatment of Afghan women wasn’t a reason for military intervention before 9/11. But while others who have asked that question have also spoken out against recent...
We can gauge the corrosive impact of the Democrats’ fixation on Russia by asking what they aren’t talking about when they talk about Russian hacking.
Like many recent political memoirists, Gordon Brown begins his story in medias res. Given his rollercoaster time in Downing Street, punctuated by the gut-wrenching drama of the financial...
The image on the seal is of the House of Commons in the mid-17th century, when the chamber was inside the old Palace of Westminster. It began to appear on seals, medallions and medals after...
‘What should I do if I get ambushed?’ I asked. ‘Well, standard operating procedure in the army is to shoot your way out. Don’t be static. Push on, fight back.’ I pointed out to him that I was...
Iraq has just had one of its least violent periods since the US invasion in 2003. Islamic State has been defeated: it lost its last town, Rawa, close to the Syrian border, on 17 November, and...
In the early years of the Scottish Parliament, Armando Iannucci performed a TV sketch in which he ascended to heaven and discovered the extraordinary things Scottish audiences had missed out...
Suppose Emmanuel Macron’s new party had found itself short of a majority in the National Assembly, and Macron had done a deal with the Corsican nationalists that in return for their...
What is the relationship between coercion and consent? Under what circumstances does power turn into authority, brute force into legitimate leadership? Can coercion work without consent? Can...
In late September, AmerisourceBergen, one of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical distribution companies with revenue of $150 billion, was fined $260 million by the US Food and Drug...
What is identity politics? Is it, to paraphrase Dylan Thomas, a part of society you don’t like that’s fighting for its interests as fiercely as yours does? Or is it, as Mark Lilla puts it in The Once...
Most Beijing residents lead unenviable lives: smog all year around except for grand occasions such as the Olympics; infernal traffic for most of the day; few convenience stores, let alone...
‘We have elevated the president to the position of a demigod, and then when he turns out to be Donald Trump, we’re shocked,’ Andrew Bacevich said to me. ‘But since Roosevelt we have vastly enhanced...
The scheme that Roosevelt hatched was simplicity itself: CIA-organised protesters would flood the streets of Tehran demanding Mossadegh’s resignation; bowing to the will of the people, army officers...
‘The germ of revolution,’ Castro asserted, ‘is not carried in submarines or ships. It is wafted instead on the ethereal waves of ideas … the power of Cuba is the power of its revolutionary ideas,...
In 2014 the movie Ocho apellidos vascos broke all records at the Spanish box office. Amaia, a young Basque woman, visits Seville for the first time. Rafa, a local Don Juan who has never left...
As IS comes close to losing its power, old rivalries and divisions are beginning to re-emerge – but in a political landscape significantly reshaped by the war with IS.
Never despair of finding diamonds in the dust. Sir Eric Pickles, until 2015 Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, isn’t the sort of figure from whom one expects or...