Reckless, hypocritical, deluded, mendacious and chauvinist as they are, the Brexiteers found a real set of circumstances, and misapplied a popular, off-the-shelf folk myth to it. By simply rejecting the...
Capitalism is in crisis, again. Inequality, measured in wages, wealth distribution, employment, ‘affordable’ housing, has become the dominant framework for understanding the...
The template for this presidency is reality television. The lead character is playing a part that depends on his own words and actions and yet is entirely contrived. The drama is organised around a series...
On the night of 3 July 2015, Alexis Tsipras, prime minister of Greece and leader of the Coalition of the Radical Left, or Syriza, addressed a large crowd that had gathered in front of the...
The significance of Corbynism has less to do with Corbyn or his politics than with what it discloses about the political system in which we live, widening an already growing gap between the reality of...
Shaded by eucalyptus and dotted with masticating kangaroos, Canberra is an unlikely contender for ‘coup capital of the world’. But the Australian capital has seen five prime...
A historian ought to know better, I suppose. But for the last decade – ever since I passed a long queue of anxious depositors outside a branch of Northern Rock in September 2007...
If, faced with fundamental environmental challenges, Keynesianism is reaching its ultimate limit, will it end with a whimper or a bang?
In the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War, my New York City primary school, like every other school in the city, held weekly practice drills to prepare us for being bombed by the Russians....
A short book could be written about British prime ministers and Zionism. It might begin in 1840, when Lord Palmerston, foreign secretary and prime minister-to-be, received a letter from...
According to recent estimates by India’s National Crime Records Bureau, every 16 minutes a crime is committed by caste Hindus against an untouchable – or Dalit, as they prefer to be called. The figures...
Thomas Sankara, the revolutionary leader of Burkina Faso, was shot dead in the presidential buildings in Ouagadougou on 15 October 1987. I was the West Africa correspondent at the time for...
‘The United Kingdom played a major part in drafting the convention,’ said the Blair government’s paper introducing the bill that became the 1998 Human Rights Act, ‘and...
In The Passions and the Interests, published in 1977, Albert Hirschman revisited the 18th-century argument that the pursuit of worldly self-interest might be the most effective way of...
‘OK, we’ve been speaking for an hour and fifteen now, so you have a choice. Either we go to questions from the audience, or we carry on for another 45 minutes. It’s up to...
We went to see the Bayeux Tapestry the other day. In January, Emmanuel Macron promised to lend it to Britain, so it seemed worth taking the children to visit it in Normandy before it got...
The tug-of-war between the two sides of Obama’s sporting personality – the team leader and the loner, the dreamer and the realist, the man who thinks anything is still possible and the man who has...
The road to Raqqa, once the de facto Syrian capital of Islamic State, looks surprisingly pastoral. As we approached the city across the plain north of the Euphrates we had to stop the car...