Corruption
The scandalous swamp of Indian politics
Picture India in 1991. You need to make several trips to Delhi and wait three years to import a computer.…
The long arm of the Russian super mafia
Mark Galeotti’s study of Russian organised crime, the product of three decades of academic research and consultancy work, is more…
Law & Order, made – and banned – in 1978, puts most recent crime series in the shade
It’s not every day that a television screenwriter is threatened with a trial for sedition, but G.F. Newman was after…
Corruption, corruption, corruption: the full story of Miami vice
Sullying the glorious sunshine, sand and sea, Miami in the 1940s, when I first ventured there, was already overcrowded, vulgar…
Gleaming pictures of the past
If you think you know what to expect from an Alan Hollinghurst novel, then when it comes to The Sparsholt…
His dark materials
In this giant, prodigiously sourced and insightful biography, John A. Farrell shows how Richard Milhous Nixon was the nightmare of…
Putting the boot into Italy
A young woman, naked and covered in blood, totters numbly down a night road. A driver spots her in his…
Punks vs. Putin
What makes for meaningful political protest? In regimes where ideology was taken seriously (such as the Soviet Union or America…
One day, two lonely people
Twenty-four long hours, two lonely people, one city in decline. This is the premise of A.L. Kennedy’s new novel Serious…
Gods and monsters
Although Nepal’s earthquake last April visited our television screens with images of seismic devastation, the disaster has probably had little…
Bribes, bickering and backhanders
The decrepitude of old age is a piteous sight and subject. In his second book Michael Honig — a doctor-turned-novelist…
Charles Moore’s Notes: Who’d be a diplomat now?
The other day, a friend told me, he had been chatting to an old friend of his who has spent…
Of course there’s no morality in top-level sport
Why do transgendered people need separate toilets? I thought, according to the prevalent orthodoxy, that the new gender they had…
The caliphate strikes back
Isis could be on the brink of creating a terrifying new world order
Seb Coe is a fine man… but his roasting over the Russian athletics scandal is justified
So Smiley was right all along: the bloody Russians were the baddest of the bad. The Pound report on the…
The greatest surprise about Nigeria on its centenary is that it exists at all
A giant was born in 1914, an African giant. The same year European powers set about each other in the…
The day of reckoning is nigh
I think this should begin with a truth-in-journalism disclosure: I know R.W. Johnson well enough to call him Bill. Since…
Barometer
Forty years on The forthcoming EU referendum has rekindled memories of the in-out Common Market referendum of 1975. But it…
Pliny the Younger on Fifa
In any huge enterprise (like Fifa), where does the rot begin? Pliny the Younger mused on this question in a…
Muck and brass
The whole idea of capitalism, according to Enlightenment philosophers, was that it created a positive spiral of moral behaviour. ‘Concern…
Worshipping la dolce vita
Like so many Britons who chased the dream and woke up in Italy I have contemplated writing a book about…
Only capitalism can save Nigeria
Is West Africa's powerhouse headed for a boom - or a coup?
Fifa and the Olympians
Those nice people at Fifa seem to be having a terrible time from the British press, which never stops accusing…
Portrait of the week
Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said: ‘Red warning lights are once again flashing on the dashboard of the global…
Money, money, money
While Mrs Oakley was patrolling the aisles in Waitrose one day recently, I slipped off into my local betting shop.…
