Terrorism
Is The Undoing properly great or just a run-of-mill thriller with a brilliant casting director?
There must be some people somewhere who vaguely know their own spouses — but if so, they don’t tend to…
The mix of slapstick and sermonising is certainly original: In Bad Taste reviewed
In Bad Taste is a slapstick comedy about five female terrorists who murder the governor of the Bank of England.…
The Begum Appeal is a fundamental error of logic
There has been an emotional response to the case of Shamima Begum, quite rightly. It is not clear to me…
An Al-Qaeda double agent explains what’s really going on in Middle East
When will the definitive history of the modern Middle East be written? For 20 years and more, a continent has…
Terror is the toughest issue facing the Tories
A prisoner is released early and just days later attacks people. It then emerges that he was known to still…
Wanting to kill us all is madness, not religion
Sudesh Amman was singularly unsuccessful in his wish to kill kafirs, as he put it, and thereby find himself surrounded…
Terror cells: how Britain’s prisons became finishing schools for extremists
Our prisons are fuelling radicalism, not fighting it
Portrait of the week: Terror in London, Trump in London and a resignation in Malta
Home Usman Khan, aged 28, out of prison on licence after serving eight years of a 16-year sentence for preparing…
Six weeks is too long for an election campaign
The number of parties represented in national election debate multiplies. There are now seven crowding on to television podiums and…
Who are we kidding – of course terror is a political issue
It was pleasing to see that old clip of Gerry Adams endorsing Jeremy Corbyn re-emerge, just before the acts of…
Only fitfully funny: Chris Morris’s The Day Shall Come reviewed
The Day Shall Come is a second feature from British satirist Chris Morris and like the first, Four Lions, it…
Revealed: Boko Haram’s child army
In the rush to declare Isis dead now that its caliphate has been routed from Iraq and Syria, it’s easy…
What drives Emily Maitlis?
It can’t be easy to find yourself on the other end of the microphone when you’re a journalist of the…
Why do we still use the Qwerty keyboard layout and not Dvorak?
‘Can you fly down this evening?’ she was asked by her boss in the Delhi office of the BBC. ‘Yes,…
How not to fight a war on terror
It has become commonplace to describe terror attacks as ‘senseless’. The horrific Easter Sunday bombings in Sri Lanka, which cost…
And I think to myself, not a wonderful world…
The story of Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan is an interesting one, I think, for what it tells us about…
Tories who side with Labour on the customs union will be rebelling over a fantasy
Jeremy Corbyn wants Britain to ‘stay in a customs union’, according to the BBC. The phrase does not make sense.…
Alastair Campbell’s mix of football and terrorism makes for an accomplished thriller
Alastair Campbell is a man of many parts. Journalist, spin doctor extraordinaire, diarist and now novelist. For this, his third…
There are many scenes in this overlong play that consist, literally, of drivel: John reviewed
The NT’s new production, John, is by a youngish American playwright, Annie Baker. We Brits tend to assume that ‘john’…
Returning jihadis must be brought to justice
At first sight, the evidence presented in David Anderson’s report into the four terror attacks committed between March and June…
Security overkill is terror’s real triumph
The moment the news broke on Halloween that an Uzbek in a rental truck had just killed eight people on…
Calling Paddock a ‘lone wolf’ isn’t racist
It’s been nearly two weeks since Stephen Paddock committed mass murder in Las Vegas and the FBI is still casting…
Navigating a new world
In the 1890s, when British-owned ships carried 70 per cent of all seaborne trade, legislators worried about the proportion of…
Verbal diarrhoea
In Beckett’s Happy Days a prattling Irish granny is buried waist-deep, and later neck-deep, in a refuse tip whose detritus…
Ratings war
Planning for the ‘war of the future’ is something generals and politicians have been doing for the past 150 years.…
