From January, there will be a new chief inspector of schools: Amanda Spielman, the secretary of state’s choice, whose appointment was confirmed in the face of fierce opposition from the...
Two contradictory thoughts now dominate the Anglo-American approach to feelings in the context of public debate. For the speaker, feelings must be restrained – a neutral style of rational euphemism...
The careers of politicians do not always end when they were supposed to. The Duke of Portland resigned as prime minister in 1783, only to have another, more successful go at governing 24 years...
Aldekerk is a village near Germany’s post-industrial Ruhr Valley, but it’s all immaculate half-timbered houses and shivering lace curtains. I went there last May and when I arrived...
Warships are built for war, but not only for war. They have always had an eloquent symbolic value as expressions of power, wealth and resolve, as instruments of threat or reassurance. They...
In 1987, the free-market economist Gary Becker proposed selling the right to live and work in the United States. For $50,000 potential residents, especially the rich and successful, could leap...
Commenting on Occupy Wall Street in late 2011, Barney Frank, then a Democratic congressman for Massachusetts, voiced a common complaint: ‘I don’t understand why people think that...
Terrorists, it seems, are at least as attached to their means as to their professed ends, and to those for whom killing is an end in itself, there is not much to say by way of rational counterargument.
As we stumble towards the end of this summer of political discontent, talk of the country drifting towards being a one-party state is cheap. The new Conservative government appears...
It was impossible to disagree when someone pointed out that a year or so ago the idea of this many people sitting in a hall during a heatwave to discuss the Labour Party would have seemed fantastical.
My father voted for Bernie Sanders in the spring and says he’ll vote for Donald Trump in November. This places him in a magical category of voters who some believe will determine the election.
Donald Trump vowed that the ‘convention in Cleveland will be amazing!’ It will probably be the only campaign promise he ever fulfils, but indeed, as watched on television, it was amazing.
On 1 October 1949, Mao Zedong stood on top of the Gate of Heavenly Peace to proclaim the victory of his revolution, and told the world that the long-suffering Chinese people had finally...
Why aren’t people more angry? The Brexit vote showed that plenty of them are. But perhaps it expressed that other feeling, the one of bewilderment, just as much. ‘Take back control’ is a cynical...
Through a failure of statecraft on a scale unmatched since Lord North lost the American colonies, David Cameron has managed to convert a problem of party management into a constitutional...
15 March 2003. Seldom can so many have gone from such odious luxury so quickly into war against such a poor country with so little provocation. I unpack and repack the medical kits. There is some good...
The inquiry has chosen to hold back on what caused the multitude of errors: was it negligence, or recklessness, or something else? In so doing it has created a space for Blair and the others who stood...
‘Despite explicit warnings,’ Chilcot said, introducing his report, ‘the consequences of the invasion were underestimated.’ A good deal of the blame for this has to be...