Simon Kuper

The feel-good football story of Watford Forever

18 November 2023 9:00 am

From the age of six, Reggie Dwight followed Watford FC’s fortunes avidly – and when he became the multimillionaire Elton John decided to do all he could to improve them

What, if anything, have dictators over the centuries had in common?

15 July 2023 9:00 am

Simon Kuper finds little to connect the strongmen of the past and present apart from their contempt for their own supporters

When violence was the norm: Britain in the 1980s

27 May 2023 9:00 am

Football hooliganism led to a shocking number of deaths, as did the many infrastructure disasters caused by negligence, while riots and street fighting were endemic

What Macron wants

3 September 2022 9:00 am

When Liz Truss said ‘the jury’s out’ on whether France was a ‘friend or foe’, Emmanuel Macron publicly corrected her:…

The conspiracy against women’s football

2 July 2022 9:00 am

The moment before the fall of women’s football can be precisely dated. On Boxing Day 1920, Dick, Kerr Ladies FC…

Bad sports, from the ancient Greeks to the present

21 August 2021 9:00 am

Sports history, writes Wray Vamplew, is sometimes ‘sentimental, reactionary and built on the implicit assumption that the sporting past was…

Levitating basketball players: investigating the psychic in sport

18 May 2019 9:00 am

Years ago, a friend persuaded me that a reviewer should almost never give a book a bad review. Most books,…

The many components of the flintlock on a late 18th-century rifle were made by hand and had to be filed to fit

Have we reached the limits of computing power — and might that be a good thing?

9 June 2018 9:00 am

Arguably, the statue in Trafalgar Square should not be of Nelson but of Henry Maudslay. He had started out as…

The Nazis had a genius for staging, inventing the procession of the Olympic torch from Athens to the host city

Hitler’s charm offensive at the Berlin Olympics was a sinister cover for his main offensive

17 February 2018 9:00 am

The British diplomat Robert Vansittart had been warning against Nazism for years, so it was a surprise when he and…

George Blake, the spy who stayed out in the cold

2 December 2017 9:00 am

I suspect George Blake, the MI6 officer turned KGB double agent, would enjoy toddling over to the Hampstead Theatre to…

McEnroe serving in a mixed doubles match with Steffi Graf at Wimbledon, 1999

Always the Superbrat

8 July 2017 9:00 am

John McEnroe’s father calls. In fact, he calls McEnroe’s manager’s phone, presumably because dad doesn’t have a direct line to…

Lessons and games

3 June 2017 9:00 am

‘Kokkinakis banged your girlfriend. Sorry to tell you that, mate,’ the Australian tennis player Nick Kyrgios remarked to his opponent…

Pomak Muslims still live in Greek and Bulgarian villages. Left: a bride embarks on her two-day winter wedding in Ribnovo, 210 km from Sofia

Frontier territory

25 February 2017 9:00 am

In Ali’s Café, just inside Turkey on the Bulgarian border, Iraqi and Syrian refugees spend their days drinking tea. Now…

Pomak Muslims still live in Greek and Bulgarian villages. Left: a bride embarks on her two-day winter wedding in Ribnovo, 210 km from Sofia

Frontier territory

23 February 2017 3:00 pm

In Ali’s Café, just inside Turkey on the Bulgarian border, Iraqi and Syrian refugees spend their days drinking tea. Now…

Knowing the score

10 December 2016 9:00 am

When I come home from work and stick my key in the door, there is a pitter-patter of tiny feet…