After Hartlepool

James Butler, 3 June 2021

Early​ results matter. They matter when TV pundits are required to fill hours of overnight election coverage, and they mattered especially during the 72-hour period that followed the UK-wide...

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Short Cuts: Not all Scots

Rory Scothorne, 3 June 2021

In​ Stone Voices, Neal Ascherson wrote that ‘in the two centuries after about 1760 … no country in Europe, and perhaps no country on earth until the European explosion into the...

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The unlikely union between a Fascist leader and a Jewish American opera singer offers interesting perspectives on Fascism’s evolving attitudes to race, religion, culture, gender and so on, particularly...

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Diary: In Darfur

Jérôme Tubiana, 3 June 2021

Abunduluk joined the RSF three years ago, but was one of the early members of the original Darfur rebellion in 2003. His body, covered with scars, is a map of the Darfur conflict. He rolled up his trousers...

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Bullets in the Mail: After Khashoggi

Krithika Varagur, 3 June 2021

Mohammed bin Salman already wields immense power and he is only just beginning. As well as rewriting the royal family’s code of seniority and bringing most ministries under his direct control, he also...

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Ghosts in the Land

Adam Shatz, 3 June 2021

The violence that broke out inside Israel was ugly, a chaotic mixture of pogroms and score-settling; it is a threat to the delicate fabric of Arab-Jewish relations that no politician in Israel can afford...

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Philanthropic Imperialism

Stephen W. Smith, 22 April 2021

For​ eight years, France has been fighting jihadists in the Western Sahel. The first deployments were in Mali. Others followed, across a swathe of arid land south of the Sahara, from...

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Short Cuts: Blame Brussels

Jan-Werner Müller, 22 April 2021

One way to politicise the pandemic would seem to be to make a contrast be­tween competence and incompetence. But that’s misleading: politics is always about choices and priorities (who will live and...

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‘If it were announced that we faced a threat from space aliens and needed to build up to defend ourselves,’ Paul Krugman said in 2012, ‘we’d have full employment in a year and a half.’ You might...

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The social identities behind the vintage references in Artem Chekh and Zakhar Prilepin’s works are the fundamental oppositions of the 21st century: on one side the liberals, the bourgeois, the cosmopolitans,...

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Gargantuanisation

John Lanchester, 22 April 2021

The shipping industry has worked hard to hide itself from view, and we have colluded with it. We don’t want to think about how that 90 per cent of everything got here. The labour of an entire industry...

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Short Cuts: Beyond Images

Alice Spawls, 1 April 2021

Men are far more likely to be killed than women; trans men and women more likely to face harm. But many women live in fear of the person they share a bed with. Daily life under duress, the bruises that...

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The ‘unconstitution’ has worked only because England’s ruling elites, out of decent self-interest, have never fully exploited its incredible lack of formal constraint on executive power. That convention...

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Diary: Salmond v. Sturgeon

Dani Garavelli, 1 April 2021

No one has come out of it well: not the committee members, or the obfuscating civil servants, or Salmond, who refused to apologise for his ‘inappropriate’ behaviour, or Sturgeon who, though full of...

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It is as­sumed that there is an uncomplicated thing called ‘talent’ or ‘ability’, and that some people have more of it than others. It is also assumed – pretty much as a fact of nature, it seems...

Read more about Snakes and Ladders: Versions of Meritocracy

Growing Pains: New Silk Roads

Laleh Khalili, 18 March 2021

Most accounts of the Belt and Road Initiative focus on its geopolitics or geoeconomics. But large infrastructure projects have wider ramifications: lives are affected, connections forged and knowledge...

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Managing the Nation

Jonathan Parry, 18 March 2021

Every step of the Brexit saga has been dictated by the Conservative Party’s struggle to save itself: to prevent voters defecting to the more uncompromising Ukip, and then to check the paralysing internal...

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The ‘I’ of autobiography and racial belonging is not assumed in Imperial Intimacies. Hazel V. Carby’s shifting perspectives for her present and past selves – her narrative moves from the singular...

Read more about Stick-at-it-iveness: Between Britain and Jamaica