In the early years of the Scottish Parliament, Armando Iannucci performed a TV sketch in which he ascended to heaven and discovered the extraordinary things Scottish audiences had missed out...
Suppose Emmanuel Macron’s new party had found itself short of a majority in the National Assembly, and Macron had done a deal with the Corsican nationalists that in return for their...
What is the relationship between coercion and consent? Under what circumstances does power turn into authority, brute force into legitimate leadership? Can coercion work without consent? Can...
In late September, AmerisourceBergen, one of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical distribution companies with revenue of $150 billion, was fined $260 million by the US Food and Drug...
What is identity politics? Is it, to paraphrase Dylan Thomas, a part of society you don’t like that’s fighting for its interests as fiercely as yours does? Or is it, as Mark Lilla puts it in The Once...
Most Beijing residents lead unenviable lives: smog all year around except for grand occasions such as the Olympics; infernal traffic for most of the day; few convenience stores, let alone...
‘We have elevated the president to the position of a demigod, and then when he turns out to be Donald Trump, we’re shocked,’ Andrew Bacevich said to me. ‘But since Roosevelt we have vastly enhanced...
The scheme that Roosevelt hatched was simplicity itself: CIA-organised protesters would flood the streets of Tehran demanding Mossadegh’s resignation; bowing to the will of the people, army officers...
‘The germ of revolution,’ Castro asserted, ‘is not carried in submarines or ships. It is wafted instead on the ethereal waves of ideas … the power of Cuba is the power of its revolutionary ideas,...
In 2014 the movie Ocho apellidos vascos broke all records at the Spanish box office. Amaia, a young Basque woman, visits Seville for the first time. Rafa, a local Don Juan who has never left...
As IS comes close to losing its power, old rivalries and divisions are beginning to re-emerge – but in a political landscape significantly reshaped by the war with IS.
Never despair of finding diamonds in the dust. Sir Eric Pickles, until 2015 Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, isn’t the sort of figure from whom one expects or...
Max Weber defined power as ‘the ability of an individual or group to achieve their own goals or aims when others are trying to prevent them from realising them’. The pursuit of...
Something strange and wonderful happens if you read every novel Drabble wrote between 1963 and 1980, in sequence, one hard on the heels of another, with your notebook page firmly headed ‘Young Women...
Almost everyone who lives in the city known to the rest of the world as Erbil calls it by its Kurdish name: Hewlêr. The Kurds in what is now Iraq – like the Kurds in Turkey, Syria...
In the quest to capture the middle ground that wins elections in a first-past-the-post system, the party of the left inevitably finds itself in an unacknowledged relationship of co-dependence with the...
Neither side is backing down. As I write, the police are raiding Catalan government offices, confiscating voting cards and arresting separatist politicians. Anyone called up to oversee voting centres...
Given that the EU is within swimming distance from the UK, has a population of more than 500 million and a GDP of almost $20 trillion (double that of China), an equivalent replacement is effectively impossible.