Jay Elwes

Dictators with the luck of the devil

19 November 2022 9:00 am

Lenin and Mussolini were chief among 20th-century leaders who owed their initial success purely to chance, says Ian Kershaw

Solving the mystery of mass almost ruined Peter Higgs’s life

6 August 2022 9:00 am

In 1993 William Waldegrave, the science minister, was looking into a project being planned on the continent. Cern, the European…

The deep roots of global inequality

11 June 2022 9:00 am

Thomas Piketty, the French economist who shot to fame for writing a colossal work of economics that many people bought…

The trouble with Thomas Piketty

8 June 2022 6:29 pm

Thomas Piketty, the French economist who shot to fame for writing a colossal work of economics that many people bought…

Could Putin be toppled? An interview with Richard Dearlove

28 May 2022 9:00 am

The former head of MI6 on where Russia has gone wrong – and what happens next

Has liberalism destroyed itself?

14 May 2022 9:00 am

According to Vladimir Putin, liberalism is an ‘obsolete’ doctrine, a worn-out political philosophy no longer fit for purpose. In this…

Has the past decade blunted our sense of the duty of care?

2 April 2022 9:00 am

Modern British history can be divided into two parts: before Covid and after. That is the central pillar of this…

Inside Putin’s mind: the lessons of Chechnya

26 March 2022 9:00 am

The lessons of Chechnya

Is it an exaggeration to talk of a ‘gender war’?

5 February 2022 9:00 am

According to Nina Power’s forceful and rather unusual What Do Men Want?, we in the West are currently engaged in…

Love in a cold climate: Snow Country, by Sebastian Faulks, reviewed

6 November 2021 9:00 am

In the months before the outbreak of the first world war, Anton Heideck arrives in Vienna. Family life offered him…

Startlingly sadistic: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, by Quentin Tarantino, reviewed

7 August 2021 9:00 am

There’s no doubt that Quentin Tarantino is a movie director of brilliance, if not genius. But can he write? Well…

It’s time the British faced some uncomfortable truths, says Matthew d’Ancona

5 June 2021 9:00 am

As Britain starts its long Covid recovery, are deeper problems lurking beneath the surface? Matthew d’Ancona certainly thinks so, and…

How the third world war was narrowly averted

8 May 2021 9:00 am

Nuclear weapons carry a payload of cold logic: if both sides have them, neither will ever use them. But in…

The myth of ‘progressive’ thinking

13 February 2021 9:00 am

Too much weight is put on the idea of ‘progress’

A bored business administrator in Leicester puts the intelligence services to shame

30 January 2021 9:00 am

In the summer of 2012, a man was walking near Jabal Shashabo, a Syrian rebel enclave, when he spotted a…

The autistic mind could hold the key to the future

14 November 2020 9:00 am

An old, cynical adage holds that ‘if all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail’. I remembered…

Shock and awe — what should we make of our Viking ancestors?

10 October 2020 9:00 am

In June 793, a raiding force arrived by boat at the island monastery of Lindisfarne, on the Northumbrian coast. The…

Disrupting the world — from a small bedroom in Hounslow

23 May 2020 9:00 am

On 6 May 2010 the eurozone crisis was tearing through the continent. Greece was bankrupt, and it looked as though…

Much-hyped technological innovation isn’t necessarily progress

9 May 2020 9:00 am

Modern advances in communication technology, computer power and medical science can sometimes be so startling as to seem almost like…

The nightmare of Okinawa made Truman decide to use the atom bomb

11 April 2020 9:00 am

The US operation of 1945 to take the island of Okinawa was the largest battle of the Pacific during the…

Why were Kraftwerk such a colossal success?

21 February 2020 10:00 pm

Everything about Kraftwerk was odd. They had no front man, they seemed to play no instruments and their strange, electronic…

Liberty depends on a delicate balance between state and society

9 November 2019 9:00 am

Liberty is a fragile thing. For thousands of years, civilisations have risen, flourished and fallen, and most of them have…

Klaus Fuchs after his release from prison in 1959

How Klaus Fuchs’s treachery may have averted Armageddon

27 July 2019 9:00 am

When Klaus Fuchs started passing atomic secrets to the KGB, he changed the course of world events. Forget about Philby…