In January 2012 François Hollande, socialist candidate for the presidency, announced on the campaign trail that his ‘true’ enemy was finance capitalism.
Thucydides may well have been the first Western author to address himself to posterity. His forerunners – Homer and Herodotus, principally – show no awareness of a readership...
It seems long ago. The city on lockdown, the raids, the cat tweets. Vestiges remain, some of them new. A green army lorry was parked at the weekly market across the street. It hadn’t...
Barack Obama’s repeated insistence that Bashar al-Assad must leave office – and that there are ‘moderate’ rebel groups in Syria capable of defeating him – has in recent years provoked quiet...
On 11 December, the director of public prosecutions, Alison Saunders, announced that all outstanding cases against Mirror Group journalists for phone hacking would be dropped, and that no...
Neil Tennant described his run of hits between ‘It’s a Sin’ and ‘Heart’ as the Pet Shop Boys’ imperial phase, when they owned the charts and charmed the...
An MP and financier dead from poison on Hampstead Heath; the secretary of a life insurance company in his office with his brains blown out; a stockbroker with his throat cut in a railway...
In November I had to cancel the teaching I was doing in Norwich to return to Calcutta to visit my mother, who is elderly and ailing. On the 8th, I didn’t pay much attention to the fact...
‘I have defeat tattooed in my DNA,’ Pablo Iglesias said in a debate on television last year, a month after announcing the formation of a new political entity called Podemos....
British air attacks on Syria, before they are an attack on Islamic State, are an attack on Syria, a foreign country, whose citizens have no say in our affairs, and which has not attacked us, or our allies.
The government got the majority that allows it to bomb Islamic State (or Daesh as we are now enjoined to call it) in Syria, but I have rarely listened to a debate in which there was such lack...
Nothing much happened on the night bus from Athens to Idomeni. A baby cried, people shuffled in their seats, the driver switched the lights on and told whoever was eating sunflower seeds not...
Got a headache? Help is at hand. At your local pharmacy or supermarket or corner shop or garage or indeed pretty much anywhere, you can buy a branded packet of 2-(4-isobutylphenyl)propionic...
Visiting Africa and Asia in the 1960s, Conor Cruise O’Brien discovered that many people in former colonies were ‘sickened by the word “liberalism”’. They saw it...
The National Health Service in England is being dismantled. But you wouldn’t know it from listening to the radio or reading the newspapers. As so often, you have to look beyond the...
In 1986 Margaret Thatcher arrived at her party's annual conference in Bournemouth with a spring in her step.
Today, Paris looks more and more like the Beirut of Western Europe, a city of incendiary ethnic tension, hostage-taking and suicide bombs.
Between the World and Me is an unrelentingly severe, taut and timely text that's been nearly universally praised.