Echoes from the Far Side: The European Age

James Sheehan, 19 October 2017

Max Weber​ defined power as ‘the ability of an individual or group to achieve their own goals or aims when others are trying to prevent them from realising them’. The pursuit of...

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Middle-Class Hair: A New World for Women

Carolyn Steedman, 19 October 2017

Something strange and wonderful happens if you read every novel Drabble wrote between 1963 and 1980, in sequence, one hard on the heels of another, with your notebook page firmly headed ‘Young Women...

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In Hewlêr: The Kurdish Referendum

Tom Stevenson, 19 October 2017

Almost everyone​ who lives in the city known to the rest of the world as Erbil calls it by its Kurdish name: Hewlêr. The Kurds in what is now Iraq – like the Kurds in Turkey, Syria...

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In the quest to capture the middle ground that wins elections in a first-past-the-post system, the party of the left inevitably finds itself in an unacknowledged relationship of co-dependence with the...

Read more about Gove or Galtieri? Popular Conservatism

Short Cuts: The Catalan Referendum

Giles Tremlett, 5 October 2017

Neither side is backing down. As I write, the police are raiding Catalan government offices, confiscating voting cards and arresting separatist politicians. Anyone called up to oversee voting centres...

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How Not to Do Trade Deals

Swati Dhingra and Nikhil Datta, 21 September 2017

Given that the EU is within swimming distance from the UK, has a population of more than 500 million and a GDP of almost $20 trillion (double that of China), an equivalent replacement is effectively impossible.

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Her trick is to avoid the country’s root problems while treating the symptoms more skilfully than any conservative politician before her has ever managed.

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In Kisumu

Tristan McConnell, 7 September 2017

When​ people in Kisumu, in western Kenya, began voting on a Tuesday morning in early August it was more like a party than an election. At the Kenyatta Sports Ground, a large triangle of dirt...

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The Saudi Trillions

Malise Ruthven, 7 September 2017

It made perfect sense that the first port of call on President Trump’s first foreign trip, in May, was Riyadh. Saudi Arabia is a country one can do business with, even as the most ardent Kremlinologists...

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Wrecking Ball: Trump’s Racism

Adam Shatz, 7 September 2017

Trump is so hollow a person, so impulsive a leader, that it’s easy to miss the great paradox of his presidency: that a cipher of a man has revealed the hidden depths, the ugly unmastered history, of...

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Diary: Femicide in Kandahar

May Jeong, 7 September 2017

‘This whole fiasco around women’s rights, it’s more an international effort than an Afghan-born one,’ Hamidi said. She kept her headscarf close and drew it across her chest every so often as we...

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Diary: Abortion in Northern Ireland

Joanna Biggs, 17 August 2017

On average, two women from Northern Ireland travel to England every day. Most are married, most are having their first abortion, most are between 20 and 34.

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Endtimes in Mosul

Patrick Cockburn, 17 August 2017

On 22 May​, Ahmed Mohsen, an unemployed taxi driver, left his house in the Islamic State-controlled western part of Mosul to try to escape across the Tigris to the government-held eastern side...

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The New Deal

Tom Crewe, 17 August 2017

‘Post-truth’ is a faulty concept because it presupposes the existence of shared, accepted ‘truths’ which are actually, you know, true.

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Short Cuts: The Withdrawal Bill

Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, 17 August 2017

The​ EU (Withdrawal) Bill was given its first reading in Parliament on 13 July. This is the most important bill to come before Parliament for decades, but it is only one of many pieces of...

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The Leveller: Famine in East Africa

Ben Ehrenreich, 17 August 2017

In Haro Sheikh​ the journalists kneeled to photograph a tortoise. It was nearly a metre long, with short, spikily scaled legs tucked beneath its shell. A black liquid stained the dry red earth...

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The Age of Detesting Trump

David Bromwich, 13 July 2017

You may curse Putin and Comey and misogyny and Wisconsin, but Trump is marching through the departments and agencies with budget cuts and policy changes that will be felt for years to come.

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Reasons for Corbyn

William Davies, 13 July 2017

The coincidence of the Corbyn surge with the horror of Grenfell Tower has created the conditions – and the demand – for a kind of truth and reconciliation commission on 40 years of neoliberalism.

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