I arrived in Dubai after midnight on 22 April, nervous about missing my connecting flight. Passing through security for the second time in nine hours, rehearsing the whole belt-discarding,...
At the heart of the Browne Report and the government’s higher education policy is a simple notion allegedly grounded in economics: that the introduction of market forces into the higher...
If the polls are right, the ANC will suffer its worst ever electoral reverse in the local elections due to be held in South Africa on 18 May. The main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance,...
What goes on in stock markets appears quite different when viewed on different timescales. Look at a whole day’s trading, and market participants can usually tell you a plausible story...
In the heyday of the labour movement, it was often observed that bosses needed workers but workers didn’t need bosses. Yet in the third and fourth quarters of 2010, corporate America posted...
On 11 April, four and a half months after he had been defeated in a UN-supervised election, Laurent Gbagbo, the former leader of Ivory Coast, was forced out of his presidential bunker by a motley...
‘Leave my brain alone,’ the dorky hero says in Peep Show, a Channel 4 sitcom, when mental fitness comes up: ‘I get my brain training from Sudoku and Alain de Botton’s...
At the time of writing, there is a stalemate in Libya. Towns such as Misurata and al-Baida, waypoints between Cyrenaica in the east and Tripolitania in the west, have been alternately in rebel...
Somewhere in the Netherlands a postwoman is in trouble. Bad health, snow and ice and a degree of chaos in her personal life have left her months behind on her deliveries. She rents a privatised...
Jean-François Copé, leader of Sarkozy’s party, the UMP, sends regular emails to the public. On the right’s poor showing in the first round of cantonal elections, for...
In his budget last month George Osborne announced that if in the future a UK company runs its internal banking arrangements through a tax haven subsidiary it will benefit from a special tax rate...
How to sum up Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, that emblematic figure of our times, with his doctorate from the LSE (‘The Role of Civil Society in the Democratisation of Global Governance...
Much has been said about Afghan corruption, and with justification, but many were aggrieved when David Petraeus, the commander of US forces in the country, said that corruption had been part of Afghan...
Contrary to a well-known English dictum, stoical if self-exonerating, all political lives do not end in failure. In postwar Europe, it is enough to think of Adenauer or De Gasperi, or perhaps...
Maurice Cowling was the English intelligentsia’s self-appointed pantomime ogre. Hamming up his villainy, he deliberately courted boos and hisses. In 1990, on the publication of the second...
Measuring 7.3 on the Richter scale, the Kobe earthquake of 1995 killed nearly 6500 people. Tall buildings crumpled, a large section of motorway flyover collapsed, and land reclaimed from the sea...
Until yesterday, I thought we were at the end of the age of intervention. The complacency that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union had been shattered by the Balkan wars; despair was...
The tumult that followed the Iranian presidential election of June 2009 revealed to an inattentive world an Iranian public that bore little resemblance to its idiosyncratic and touchy rulers. It...