China
One foot on the catwalk
St James Theatre hosts a new play about Alexander McQueen (real name Lee), whose star flashed briefly across the fashion…
Katmandu Notebook
After the first earthquake we were told that the chance of another one was 200 to 1. A fortnight later,…
Shrunk
America’s psychoanalysts are becoming an endangered species
The roots of the matter
British people buy £43 million worth of human hair a year. So who’s selling?
Indulge your inner reptile
What do you get if you cross renegade psychoanalyst Carl Jung with lizard-men conspiracist David Icke? It is a question…
Designer fatigue
Different concepts of luxury may be inferred from a comparison of the wedding feast of Charles Bovary and Emma Rouault…
Little brother’s helper
Can there ever have been another book in which one of the authors (Anne Thurston in this case) so effectively…
Just in time, Osborne answers Labour’s 50p tax trick with a bumper monthly surplus
Last week’s public borrowing and tax-receipt figures, headlined ‘Chancellor hails biggest monthly surplus in seven years’, received considerably less attention…
Austerity really is a virtue, whatever the Greeks think
The only question I remember from my Oxford moral philosophy paper was ‘What is integrity and is it a virtue?’…
No mappa mundi
As a boy I spent quite a lot of my free time trying to fake up ancient-looking documents. This hopeless…
This time round, the eurozone looks robust enough to get rid of its Greek problem
Ever since European Central Bank president Mario Draghi declared himself ready, in July 2012, ‘to do whatever it takes to…
Portrait of the week
Home The government, expecting a backbench rebellion over the European Arrest Warrant, did not present it for a separate vote…
Cultural revolution
We have read about the remarkable opening up of China in recent years: how many people live there and how…
Will Osborne’s tilt against Double Dutch tax dodgers play into Farage’s hands?
George Osborne’s promise to crack down on multinational companies’ avoidance of UK taxes by the use of impenetrable devices such…
Hong Kong vs China
Hong Kong’s protests reflect not just tension with the mainland, but a great Chinese tradition. That’s what really scares Beijing
The shadow of the tanks
Looking at these protests, I fear another Tiananmen
More war for oil
You can’t understand any of the world’s crises without understanding petropolitics
The green opium of the people
I was in Shanghai interviewing a Chinese film director and an actor. We were discussing government censorship. How did anyone…
How to rule the world
Genghis Khan, unlike most Mongols in history, is a household name, regularly misappropriated as a right-wing totem. If we recall…
Pfizer’s boss is winning the spin game while Miliband is losing all credibility
Pfizer will almost certainly have to offer more than its second bid of £50 a share for rival drug giant…
Putin’s winning hand
Russia is making the West look posturing, weak and divided
Investment: Be tech savvy
Technology investing has come a long way since the dotcom bust
Why a trillion dollars of dividends is a milestone worth celebrating
Dividends paid by listed companies around the world passed $1 trillion for the first time last year, we learn from…
Remaking history
What does freedom mean to you? That’s the question the BBC World Service has been asking of us through its…
Looking for racism
Britain has less prejudice than the countries where I’ve lived before – and more people taking offence
