Few people’s reputations have been improved by the credit crisis. One is the BBC’s Robert Peston; another is Vince Cable. A third is Gillian Tett, capital markets editor of the

Read more about All Those Arrows: a Major Cause of the Financial Crisis

At this very moment, long queues are probably forming outside Tel Aviv’s latest culinary thing: the yoghurterias. Even in the middle of the night you have to wait in line to get a cold and...

Read more about Fantasising Israel: Tel Aviv’s Centenary

Diary: a report from Westminster

Chris Mullin, 25 June 2009

8 May, Sunderland. A massive new feeding frenzy. The Telegraph has got its hands on a computer disc of our unexpurgated expenses claims and has begun publishing highlights. Page after unedifying...

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Political journalism is a tricky business. First, there’s the hanging around in the bars and tea-rooms of the House of Commons in the hope of picking up scraps of gossip from malcontents....

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Return to Afghanistan: a report from Kabul

Patrick Cockburn, 11 June 2009

Compared to Baghdad, Kabul is quiet. Checkpoints are everywhere, manned by Afghan police in tattered grey uniforms, but the police look relaxed and their searches of people and cars are often...

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Short Cuts: Politicians’ Spouses

Thomas Jones, 11 June 2009

A spouse used to be considered an indispensable asset for a politician; but then not so long ago bank shares looked like a good investment. For the moment the most notorious of the sub-prime...

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A Car of One’s Own: Chariots of Desire

Andrew O’Hagan, 11 June 2009

This was the day General Motors came to the end of the road. I once asked a Sudanese politician to name the thing that in his eyes proved a nation was a nation. He didn’t hesitate:...

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Following the great parliamentary expenses scandal from afar has been to view my home country through the wrong end of a telescope: so many scuttling figures, comically diminished in scale, like...

Read more about Trouble at the Fees Office: Alice in Expenses Land

It’s Finished: The Banks

John Lanchester, 28 May 2009

It’s a moment of confusion and loathing that most of us have experienced. You’re in a shop. It’s time to pay. You reach for your purse or wallet and take out your last note....

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The first part of Jeremy Harding’s piece on Sharia finance can be read here.The rules that govern Islamic banking and finance are non-negotiable, cast in tradition, as good as stone. A...

Read more about Islam and the Armies of Mammon: Islam and High Finance

Seven years ago now, in January 2002, came the first shocking images of human beings in rows in aircraft, hooded and shackled for transportation across the Atlantic, much as other human beings...

Read more about ‘Make sure you say that you were treated properly’: Torture, Secrecy and the British State

In early September 1997, Danny Yatom, the head of Mossad, arranged a special screening for Binyamin Netanyahu, who was then prime minister. The film, shot on the streets of Tel Aviv, presented...

Read more about Mishal’s Luck: The Plot against Hamas

Diary: in Transdniestria

Jonathan Steele, 14 May 2009

I have lived in and reported from Communist countries for many years, but until this spring I had never been to one where the Communists had won power in a nationwide multi-party poll that...

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On 16 April, President Medvedev announced the official end of Russia’s ‘counter-terrorist operation’ in Chechnya, effectively declaring victory in the long war against Chechen...

Read more about The Murder List: Kadyrov’s Death Squads

Diary: Back to School

Jenny Diski, 30 April 2009

It has been my habit, since I was very young, to keep easy sentiment, nostalgia, optimism even, in a secure box, and to forget where I left the key. This isn’t a confession, as it might...

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Diary: IRA Splinter Groups

Daniel Finn, 30 April 2009

A few years ago I called into a public meeting in Dublin on the future of Republicanism. It seemed to me, listening to the proceedings, that the prospects weren’t good. The world’s...

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The Money that Prays: Sharia Finance

Jeremy Harding, 30 April 2009

Last September, as dust and debris from the tellers’ floors began raining onto the empty vaults below, a note of satisfaction was sounded by bankers in the Arab world. Financial institutions...

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Young men who join gangs are participating in an alternative system of social cohesion. Each gang upholds its collective will through a range of penalties which include death, torture and...

Read more about Protection Rackets: Gang Culture in the Middle Ages