Features
The skinny jeans conspiracy
Why will no one sell trousers that fit me?
I believe in miracles
Here’s why
Investment: Britannia über alles
Why the UK economy will one day overtake Germany
Investment: Straight-talking money
There’s an unlikely new role model for sellers of savings products
Investment: Defying the tide
Carney’s ‘forward guidance’ already looks like a farce
Investment: No service, no smile
China’s banks are weak, ill-managed puppets of the state
Notes on …The Tarn Valley
Why didn’t I know about the Tarn Valley? I’d often been right next door. But here, north-east of Toulouse, between…
The answer to the Ukip problem
Cameron must appeal not to the party’s leadership but to its voters
Let’s make a deal
Whatever the leaders think, we can create a Tory-Ukip pact from the bottom up
Too close for comfort
Ennobled after loyal service to the government, Lord Finkelstein embodies the collapse of boundaries between newspapers and politics
‘Are you my death?’
What it was like at the Westgate mall, from two of those who survived
An African Khmer Rouge
If Al-Shabaab was behind the terrorist attack in Nairobi, then the group has come a long way since its foundation…
The ECHR is ‘unacceptable’
It’s not enough to repeal the Human Rights Act, says Chris Grayling – our Supreme Court, not Strasbourg, must be supreme
Electric daydreams
The winning essay in our contest for exposing environmental pseudoscience takes on the expensive and damaging myth of the electric car
Notes on…The house museums of Paris
It doesn’t matter how many times they expand the Louvre or the Musée d’Orsay, Paris’s past is so colossally rich…
Ed Miliband’s last laugh
Unless something drastic changes in the polls, the Tories will pay dearly for treating Miliband as a joke. And so will the rest of us
A Blairite for Ed
Tristram Hunt represents the slice of Labour that Miliband most needs to hold on to
Old friends
Facebook makes reinventing yourself at university much trickier
My 50 weddings
The lessons of a perpetual guest
Merkel will win – but why?
Germany’s integrationalist elite are prepared to pay out forever to protect the euro
The mystery of ‘plebgate’
Was there a conspiracy against Andrew Mitchell? And why have the police gone quiet on the subject?
Notes on …Vodka
James Bond’s ‘Vodka martini, shaken, not stirred’ will never be a mark of sophistication for me because vodka and I…
Fresh wit and wisdom
A selection from the latest edition of The Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations, edited by Gyles Brandreth
A Transylvanian notebook
Ehe-Gefängnis. The word, strictly speaking (which is how one should always speak), means ‘marriage prison’, and refers to an austere…
The end of the party
The decline of tribal loyalties spells the end of the big traditional political organisations
