Daniel Soar

One effect of the failed Christmas Day underpants bombing on NW Flight 253 to Detroit was to reveal how hard it is for counterterrorism bureaucracies to know, or do, anything about anyone. A leaked US Transport Security Agency document briefly required not only that passengers had been to the loo 61 minutes before their flight landed, but also that – with the exception only of heads of...

There are probably more sophisticated reasons for admiring Milton, but I always liked the way his Satan was ‘involved in rising mist’. Involved. There aren’t many writers who are such literalists when it comes to the etymological uses of words: you’d have to have Latin coming out of your ears to think of making the meaning of the word a word is derived from more...

It’s now at last clear that most Labour politicians are sure they’re going to lose the next general election. Some of them are behaving as though they’re already in opposition. Not by criticising actual government policy – they’re too craven for that – but in the more modern way, à la Blair c.1995 and Cameron c. 2005, of calling for a...