The particular lure of selling student loan accounts is that it would allow the government to swap repayments scheduled to come in over the next 35 years for cash today.
O ne of the things Cameron and Obama have in common is that they both owe their rapid political ascent to a single, shortish speech. Obama gave his in 2004 at the Democratic Convention in...
R oughly every other night for the past two months, my phone has rung at around 11 p.m. Most of the time I don’t answer, as I don’t speak any of the caller’s language and he...
I n October 1988 the Conservative student association at Liverpool University invited a diplomat from the South African embassy to speak at one of its events. In those Cold War days Nelson...
When I first arrived in Maidan a few months after the violence had ended, the square was still a tent city surrounded by barricades of tyres, car parts and furniture.
When John Kerry visited Cairo last year he reported that Sisi had given him ‘a very strong sense of his commitment to human rights’.
Why would the government be putting us through all this if it didn’t have to?
I n the week following the atrocities, a wave of moral hysteria swept France. ‘Je suis Charlie’ became almost obligatory. The Hollande/Valls message was simple: either you were for...
What is it like to be a passenger on a bus, or standing in a cheering crowd at the finishing line of a marathon, in the seconds after a bomb goes off, when you know you’re hurt but not where or...
Y ou know that thing where you draw a line in the sand, stand behind it and declare: ‘They shall not pass!’ That’s what the Swiss National Bank, the SNB, did in September...
The preoccupation with racial and gender identity has hollowed out political language, the void filled by an apparently apolitical alternative.
I n the autumn of 2001 Mohamedou Ould Slahi was working in Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania, setting up computer networks. He was born in the hinterlands, son of a nomadic camel trader,...
N igeria’s general election, which takes place on 14 February, is expected to be the most closely contested for 35 years or more. President Goodluck Jonathan and his People’s...
B arely three months away from the election it is impossible to say who is likely to win: it could be either of the main parties, or it could be neither. Plenty of past elections have been too...
N early five thousand people have been killed in eastern Ukraine since April 2014; according to Ukrainian government figures, 514,000 have been internally displaced by the fighting, with another...
I t was a horrific event. It was condemned in most parts of the world and most poignantly by many cartoonists. Those who planned the atrocity chose their target carefully. They knew that such...
The Northern Ireland peace process began with an exaggeration. Or what others might call a falsehood.
The US national security state is the lengthened shadow of Dick Cheney.