For many years now – and especially since 9/11 – there has been much strongly felt disagreement about what Islam is. Is it a religious faith like Christianity, where theological...
When the Earl of Bute resigned as prime minister in April 1763 it looked as if the North Briton, a paper whose vituperative attacks had dogged his administration, had achieved its ambition and...
Philippe Sands elicits the most extraordinary revelations in his exploration of the ‘great action’ of August 1942, when the Jews of Lemberg were sent to their deaths.
In the run-up to the EU referendum, the Leave campaign has struggled to win the argument about jobs, prosperity, the value of the pound in your pocket and world peace, but has felt on safer...
If Britain votes to leave the EU it will take several years to disentangle what’s to be kept and what discarded from our EU-saturated legislation. The law of the European Union has left...
As he lay dying Alexander Litvinenko solved his own murder and foresaw the future: a professional detective on his last case, with himself as the victim.
In October 2015, the government amended the ministerial code, removing all references to the obligation on ministers to comply with international law when carrying out their duties. This quiet...
Is it a condition on the acceptability of warfare that those who kill should put their lives on the line?
Until the Supreme Court gave its landmark judgment in R. v. Jogee on 18 February, it was possible for someone to be convicted of a crime which they did not personally commit or intend to...
It is striking how many Catholic organisations seem to do a whole range of lucrative things they were never set up to do, while still enjoying tax exemption as religious institutions.
On 11 December, the director of public prosecutions, Alison Saunders, announced that all outstanding cases against Mirror Group journalists for phone hacking would be dropped, and that no...
Back in 1954, the American critic Ernest Campbell Mossner brought out a Life of David Hume that was not only a pioneering work of scholarship but also a labour of love. Mossner wanted to...
Not for the first time, Mr Justice Peter Smith, a judge of the Chancery Division of the High Court, got his personal life and his judicial work entangled. This time it concerned his luggage,...
Sometime in the late 430s, the pious nun Melania recalled a vision she and her husband had shared thirty years before in Rome when they were young and very rich: One night we went to sleep,...
Today, Paris looks more and more like the Beirut of Western Europe, a city of incendiary ethnic tension, hostage-taking and suicide bombs.
One night in July Wang Yu, a lawyer in her mid-forties, returned to her home in Beijing after seeing her husband and teenage son off at the airport, unaware that they had both been detained by police...
What do the fish call Muhammad? One of his earliest disciples said that different creatures called him by different names. He was known as Abd al-Quddus under the sea and Abd al-Ghaffar among...
Notwithstanding the 55:45 split between unionists and nationalists in the independence referendum last autumn, the major – if unacknowledged – cleavage in Scottish politics lies...