Most of us would find it horrible to be told that we aren’t worth engaging with, that our views are socially unacceptable or merely a function of demography. But that it is painful to be on the receiving...
Because the USSR had no military presence in Africa, it relied on the work of intelligence services – the GRU and the KGB – and institutions such as the International Department to conduct a Cold War...
You cannot help being struck by the awesome stability of all the Bank of England’s arrangements: the paper for banknotes was manufactured at Portals’ mills in Hampshire from 1724 until the switch to...
The British and American right differ in the weight they place on ideological purity. With a limited cast of characters – and an even smaller pool of funders – British conservatives can ill afford...
Many white Southerners adopted their own equation of the era of the civil rights movement with Reconstruction, warning that federal civil rights legislation violated local freedom. Despite the courage...
History was expunged from the national school curriculum more than a decade ago because, it was claimed, there was no interest in it. Evidently, the political establishment continues to fear that knowledge...
Is there a thread we can trace back through the post-independence era that might help us arrive at an explanation for what is happening in Khartoum now? There’s no doubt that successive experiments...
Ten years ago Sark was at a crossroads. Change imposed from outside the island seemed inevitable, but would it be dictated by the Barclays brothers, or by a British-style civil service bureaucracy?...
There was something perverse about Israel’s choice of Asunción as a destination for dispossessed Palestinians. Alfredo Stroessner had been running Paraguay as a military dictatorship for fifteen years...
Humza Yousaf narrowly won the SNP leadership against Nicola Sturgeon’s former finance secretary Kate Forbes, a member of the fundamentalist Free Church of Scotland, who emerged from the contest as the...
If the size of empires increases in great bursts does it follow that there will be another sudden expansion? Will the world eventually be consolidated into just a few states, and finally a world state?...
The public and most of the press were suspicious of the reform from the start, simply because it meant revisiting the mystifying labyrinth of the pension system. Trade union actuaries and compute-your-pension...
The populists had emerged out of the nihilist milieu as its most committed revolutionaries, embracing an austere code of ethics. Like Kropotkin, they were motivated by modern science rather than Hegelian...
In the absence of a plausible explanation, the list of acceptable ID seems to be a clumsy effort to favour the older, Conservative-tending voter at the expense of the younger and more Labour-inclined....
The neglected details of Gautam Adani’s frictionless rise show how, after their calamitous romance with Russia’s oligarchy, Western politicians, journalists and bankers have facilitated the ascent...
The Ukrainian authorities ‘wanted Saakashvili to be in power’, so that he would ‘start a war against Russia and join Ukraine, involving Georgia in the war’. The opposition calls this scaremongering,...
The reason last June’s massacre at Barrio Chino caused a scandal wasn’t that so many died there, it was that Spain can’t credibly distance itself from the deaths. That isn’t a problem when the...
Statutory Sick Pay in the UK is particularly ungenerous, replacing less than 20 per cent of average earnings; among advanced economies, only the US and South Korea offer something worse: no mandatory sick...