Which country locks up the most people?
Girls only Polish village Miejsce Odrzanskie was reported not to have had a single boy born in the past decade,…
How Boris’s Roman predecessors took back control
The Tories, allegedly a ‘one-nation’ party, are currently imposing Brexit on a divided nation. As a result, some Tory MPs…
I’m giving £200 to whoever can tell me who has made the nation’s buttocks ache
Look out. Here comes a column banging on about something that, in the grand scheme of things, really doesn’t matter.…
Contraception is the answer to climate change
When last week’s IPCC report warned that the human race may soon have trouble feeding itself, my reaction was: duh.…
If investors are fleeing to gold, this is not the time to be smug
It came as no great surprise that the UK economy contracted by 0.2 per cent in the second quarter, following…
An all-female cabinet? Insert your own joke here
I wonder what Jacques Derrida would have made of the new leader of the UK Independence party? In the philosopher’s…
Give Hong Kongers real security: a British passport
We seem to be building up to a second Tiananmen Square, 30 years after the first. This time the venue…
How No. 10 is taking back control
Every Friday at 6 p.m. government aides are summoned to No. 10 Downing Street for a meeting with Dominic Cummings,…
Right from wrong: a guide to the new European politics
Italy is preparing to go back to the polls and this time Matteo Salvini looks set to return as the…
The secret of Matteo Salvini’s success
Last summer, when Italy became the first major European country to get a populist government, Steve Bannon was cock-a-hoop. The…
History holds far fewer lessons for Brexit than both sides think
How we love bringing history into our political debates. It may seem strange in a country where so little history…
Can a church blessing tame my unruly dog?
The picture on the front of the Animal Blessing Service programme featured a dog, a cat, a rabbit, a goldfish,…
Right-wing comics are bringing variety back to the Fringe
I’ve been coming to the Edinburgh Fringe for five years, but this is the first time I’ve dipped my toe…
From Hong Kong to Kashmir, a new authoritarianism is on the rise
Frank Johnson, editor of The Spectator until cruelly sacked to make way for Boris Johnson, never wasted ideas. He liked…
Britain’s jazz scene is in full swing
Jazz died in 1959. At least, that’s what New Orleans trumpeter Nicholas Payton wrote in 2011 as part of a…
Migration in Europe is the ripple effect of the second world war
Two words may pique the reader’s interest on the cover of this timely, panoramic history of Europe by the distinguished…
Popular medical non-fiction will soon have covered every human body part
Nobody warns you when you start medical school that your career decisions have only just begun. Up to a decade…
Pity poor Candace Bushnell, still flogging Sex and the City at 60
On paper, Candace Bushnell and the medieval warlord El Cid don’t have a lot in common. The first made a…
A novel take on the Western: Inland, by Téa Obreht, reviewed
Téa Obreht’s second novel is an expansive and ambitious subversion of Western tropes, set in fin de siècle America. We…
The trail-blazing women writers of the 1960s were quite different from the male Angries
The accepted story of mid-20th century culture in Britain belongs to the boys: the British Invasion, Beyond the Fringe and…
Walter Bagehot: the revered Victorian who got almost everything wrong
Who was Walter Bagehot? For generations of politics students he has been the all-but-unpronounceable — Bayge-hot? Baggott? — author of…
Does Kim Jong-un deliberately emulate a Bond villain?
North Korea watchers are good book-buyers, rarely able to resist scratching that itch of interest caused by the world’s worst…
‘I’ll miss Brexit when it’s solved’: Frank Skinner interviewed
Only one thing makes Frank Skinner nervous. ‘Water. Water scares me. I don’t get nervous on stage. Just in swimming…
Where are the art fans in Edinburgh? Getting their eyes frazzled by Bridget Riley
The old observatory on Edinburgh’s Calton Hill may be the most favourably positioned art venue in the world. Recently resurrected…
West Side Story’s flick-knife-to-the-guts thrill never landed its final blow
It was as though Damien Hirst had confessed a secret passion for Victorian watercolours, or Lars von Trier had admitted…
