World
Elon Musk’s weird weekend
He may have been racking up the hours at the office lately, but even Elon Musk knows when to take…
Do Harry and Meghan really think they’ve done nothing wrong?
Not for the first time, it was Jeremy Clarkson’s fault. The weekend news, which began with a forensic dissection of…
What adults don’t get about children’s books
Children’s writing has been having a bit of a moment over the past couple of weeks, after a conversation on social…
Macron’s World Cup loss is nothing compared with the problems he faces in France
One can only feel for Kylian Mbappé. If scoring a hat-trick in a World Cup final but ending up on the…
Harry, Meghan and the troubling erasure of Christmas
H and M – no, the other brand – are causing trouble again. ‘Sussexes send out Happy Woke-mas card to…
The Met Office isn’t to blame for possible blackouts
In the hierarchy of excuses for tipping Britain into a month of blackouts, ‘the Met Office didn’t say winter would…
Why Russia couldn’t give up on empire
One hundred years ago this December, delegations from the core nations of the East Slavs, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus signed the…
Why Argentina is the team we love to hate
With the prospect of Messi closing out his glorious career with the ultimate prize it’s likely most neutral fans will…
What the revisionists get wrong about America’s nuclear bombings
The use of nuclear weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki is hardly a festive subject. But given that in recent conversations…
What will Putin do next?
If you were Putin, what would you do? Predicting your adversary’s future moves requires putting yourself in his shoes. As…
How Dickens invented Christmas
Time was, the Christmas shopping season used to last a week or two. Now it drags on for months. Never…
Why we should take the Twitter Files seriously
‘Shadowbanning’, ‘visibility filtering’, ‘de-amplification’ – the Twitter Files released since Elon Musk took over have given us a new and sinister language…
When it comes to migrants, Britain needs to be more French
Rishi Sunak’s fighting talk as he launched the latest Tory crackdown on illegal Channel migrants this week, with the dramatic words…
Why are political failures like David Cameron so richly rewarded?
The news – reported in the FT Weekend – that former Prime Minister David Cameron is to teach a three-week course…
Nothing will ever be good enough for Harry and Meghan
Imagine you’ve paid good money to see a French farce – and halfway through, it turns into a Greek tragedy.…
Elon Musk makes it up as he goes
Since Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, the script has been flipped. Pontificators at all points of the ideological spectrum are spinning…
Is Putin hiding away?
December is usually a busy month for Vladimir Putin, but not this year. In the run-up to Christmas, Russia’s president…
Could 30,000 Britons really die of flu this winter?
Could flu really kill 30,000 people in Britain this year as our immune systems, rendered naïve after two years of…
Rogues Heroes: What Prince Harry has in common with the SAS’s founder
I’ve enjoyed the recent BBC blockbuster Rogue Heroes, a drama that is mercifully free from the moralising that Auntie often…
Putin’s hawks are turning on each other
Feathers are flying and divisions are widening among Russia’s hawks as the degree to which the invasion of Ukraine was…
Why Don should make way for Ron
When I arrived in Washington, DC in 2006 to learn about US politics, someone told me that in America, there…
How did free speech become a right-wing value?
In early May, I explored the left’s reaction to billionaire Elon Musk potentially buying Twitter and his vow to make…
The EU is letting itself be blackmailed by Hungary
For Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, there is only one lesson to be learned from the compromise reached with the…
The Bank of England’s interest hike shows the worst is to come
After a faltering start in its programme of rate rises, the Bank of England is catching up. Today’s half-point rise…
Harry and Meghan’s Netflix show is worse than the Royals could ever imagine
At the end of the sixth episode of the interminable, grotesquely self-indulgent wallow in self-pity and score-settling that constitutes Netflix’s…
