In 1996 I visited Penjwin, an impoverished village in Iraqi Kurdistan close to the Iranian border, where people were trying to make a little money through what must be one of the most...
Ten years ago, London might have had a different vision for Europe and been taken seriously, even rallied other member states. Now Britain is seen not just as inward-looking, but as selfish and sullen.
Brexotics have always regarded the EU as a deep-laid plot to undermine and eventually to extinguish the nation-state in general and Britain in particular; ‘they’ are always ganging up against ‘us’.
Sometimes, the most important insights make their way into the world without fanfare. As yet, few have picked up on an analysis by Thomas Philippon of the history of the unit cost of financial intermediation.
David Laws’s memoir of his time in government ends with everything in tatters, his party having gone from being a full partner in government to having the same number of MPs as the Democratic Unionists.
On a sound file sent to me via WhatsApp, a teenage girl sobs, and an older woman says: ‘Don’t worry, the white people will help you.’ The girl is 17, from a village in Edo state in Nigeria.
Overnight, Dilma Rousseff’s Workers’ Party, which had long enjoyed by far the highest level of approval in Brazil, became the most unpopular party in the country. How had it come to this?
It’s time for the bitcoin to decide what it wants to be when it grows up. It could have an impact as great as the new kind of banking introduced in Renaissance Italy.
Flanked by his ministers of defence and foreign affairs, Vladimir Putin looked characteristically stern as he went on television on 14 March to announce a significant reduction in...
A master politician like Merkel will never let a good crisis go to waste. By opening the German border, Merkel could hope to recapture the moral high ground.
This election year will be remembered as the one in which two candidates rallied the indignation of millions against the establishment. Both Trump and Sanders actually call it that. The...
Baraa Halabieh could recall almost every detail of the long journey from his family home in the Syrian city of Hama: every bus and taxi fare, where he slept or failed to sleep each night, how...
Angolans sustained immense losses in the fight to end apartheid. It was certainly heroic, but it was ruinous too.
On 15 June 2009, Gordon Brown announced an inquiry into the Iraq war. Although oral hearings finished in early 2011, it won’t report until the middle of this year...
The UK state – its economy, its culture, its fractured identities and party system – is in a much deeper crisis than many want to accept. Its governors, at least in public, remain...
On 4 October 1954 Pakistan’s army chief General Ayub Khan passed the hours of a sleepless night at the Dorchester Hotel in London writing ‘A Short Appreciation of Present and...
I arrived at Al-Modireyet Amn al-Giza, the Giza Directorate of Security, late in the morning of Monday, 8 February. ‘But where’s the entrance?’ I asked the taxi driver...
The war in Syria and Iraq has produced two new de facto states in the last five years and enabled a third quasi-state greatly to expand its territory and power.