Where is trauma meant to lodge itself when the mind, like the body, in shreds or shot to pieces, is no longer anything that might remotely be called home?
Who began the killing? At root, arguments about the genesis of the Troubles are arguments about responsibility for murder, and that’s one reason it has proved so hard to disentangle...
Public land became surplus as the result of the state’s determination to shrink itself. At the heart of this project lay a brazen deceit.
Not much has stuck with me from my two years studying politics at A-Level. The word ‘quango’ and what it stands for (quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation). And the couple...
On 10 December last year, 15 men and women were found guilty of ‘endangering safety’ at Stansted Airport by ‘means of a device or substance’. The offence was created in...
At 35 per cent, the turnout for Nigeria’s general election in February was the lowest since democracy succeeded military rule twenty years ago. During the three weeks I spent on the road...
Israel’s legislative elections on 9 April were a tribute to Binyamin Netanyahu’s transformation of the political landscape. At no point were they discussed in terms of which...
Anglo-American involvement in the Middle East has always been principally about the strategic advantage gained from controlling Persian Gulf hydrocarbons, not Western oil needs.
On music as on art and culture in general, Fisher’s standards were strict. ‘Music that acknowledged and accelerated what was new’ in the world around it was a force for good, but music (and art...
On 22 March, Robert Mueller, the special counsel charged with investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 election and its possible connection with the Trump campaign, submitted his report to...
Every time a bitcoin ‘miner’ is successful they create for themselves 12.5 new bitcoins, currently worth around $60,000. If they don’t succeed, they can have another go...
The clue is in the name. Parliament is designed for talk – for the expression of opinion and criticism. Pundits, particularly in the 19th century, wrote about ‘parliamentary...
One can fly to Japan from anywhere, but from Japan one can only fly to the Third World, and it hardly matters whether one lands in Kinshasa, London, New York or Zurich: they are all places...
When the Chinese e-commerce platform Alibaba, the biggest retailer in the world, launched an app allowing its customers to buy products and transfer money instantaneously, it understood that...
Two years into the Trump presidency, it is a gross exaggeration to talk of an end to the American world order. The two pillars of its global power – military and financial – are still firmly in place....
Chris Mullin’s A Very British Coup was a nostalgic book that turned into a prophetic one. First published in 1982 and set towards the end of that decade, it nonetheless recalled...
As the case of the missing students became international news, parents and activists went looking. They found first one mass grave, then another and another and another. Not their children’s. Other...
Behind all the distorted coverage, it seems to me, is an exoticising assumption: they’ll never be quite like us, though they deserve extravagant praise for trying. But Saudi Arabia is a country like...