The Republic of Artsakh has gone, but what was it? From the perspective of Azerbaijan’s government, and probably that of international law, Artsakh was an illegal entity. In Armenia it was held up as...
The imposition of a windfall tax may be seen as an exercise in fiscal populism or a confession of intellectual bankruptcy, but it’s also an implicit affirmation that society has a right to reclaim at...
Who is counted, how, and for what purpose, has changed a lot since 1790. No census has exactly matched its predecessor in method or design: each time, some questions are dropped and others added, while...
Is Bill Browder an oligarch? His critics think he ticks many of the boxes. He made his fortune in Russia in the 1990s, profiting heavily from the newly privatised industries. He was a vocal supporter of...
‘Going online to try to find some simulation of the friendships and communities I missed,’ Klein found instead ‘The Confusion: a torrent of people discussing me and what I’d said and what I’d...
People of every political persuasion now claim Martin Luther King as a forebear. But during his lifetime, King and the civil rights movement aroused considerable opposition, not only in the South. The...
Weber insists that everything remain in its rightful place. Politicians should stick to politics, and scientists to science. Religion should vacate public life, except as an inner psychological ‘vocation’...
Data and statistics, all of them, are man-made. They are also central to modern politics and governance, and the ways we talk about them. That in itself represents a shift. Discussions that were once about...
These days, the debate about the balance of private and public investment in the Global South has been settled in favour of private capital. Privately owned mobile and internet networks, potable water...
Macaulay seems to have belonged to what revisionist historians now refer to as the Christian Enlightenment, a movement that stood apart from the more familiar Enlightenment of sceptical or deistic philosophes....
Stephen Vaughan’s life reminds us that there is no sweeping historical change that cannot also be measured in the small, incremental, often painful adjustments of everyday life. His political service,...
Diplomats are often quite isolated from the societies to which they are posted. Their central task is not statecraft but the promotion of their country’s ‘interests’ – reducible to the arms industry...
As Western investors became controlling shareholders in the railways, mines and plantations of the global South, the supposedly peaceful worlds of trade and finance became harder to distinguish from imperialism....
In small village and coastal resorts in Wales and Cornwall, for a few weeks each summer and increasingly at weekends throughout the year, the richest and the poorest end up in close proximity. The disparities...
J. Edgar Hoover liked to say he didn’t hire policemen but investigators. Agents were university graduates, only to be seen in dark suits and ties (hats were required when outside). Until 1934, they weren’t...
The virtue of Starmer’s politics is its impatience for power, ruthlessness in its pursuit and desire for concrete achievement. Its vices include conformism and a loathing of dissent.
The unionist fondness for Union Jacks does not preclude violent resistance to the British state when its policy conflicts with the interests of Protestant Ulster. Under the auspices of the Ulster Covenant...
Despite evidence showing that only the top 10 per cent of earners received above-inflation pay rises last year, Rishi Sunak has threatened to squeeze public sector wages further in an effort to combat...