“Politics,” the German sociologist Max Weber said, is “a strong and slow boring of hard boards.” That’s boring as a verb, of course, meaning drilling. (In German: “Ein starkes langsames Bohren von ...

It is one of the great might-have-beens in modern British history. In June 2003, Gordon Brown ruled out joining the euro, for the time being. The road to Brexit 13 years later was a long and winding ...

There’s no telling what will make a nonfiction bestseller. Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time and the late Erich von Däniken’s junk archaeology about “ancient astronauts” both seem implausible ...

“The people of Dundee and Bangor feel just as distant from Holyrood and the Senedd as they do from Westminster.” In a speech largely focused on English devolution, this was all Andy Burnham really had ...

Andy Burnham has announced an ambitious plan to create a Number 10 North, which is fine as far as it goes. But why stop there? If Britain is serious about devolving power, levelling up, rebalancing ...

On Patreon, you can pay Bob Dylan $5 a month to read his lectures, short stories and imagined “letters never sent” between historical figures, such as Fred Astaire and HG Wells. So far, so Dylan. You ...

How do you do a centenary exhibition for Marilyn Monroe? This is not as straightforward question as it seems, for Monroe was just not another movie star. And she was also not just a movie star. The ...

It is, apparently, none of our business. It’s an entirely private matter. A would-be prime minister trousers £5m from a billionaire living on the other side of the world. So what? Nobody cares. Mind ...

This is a deeply uncomfortable moment to be a member of the Jewish community. After the atrocities committed by Hamas on 7th October, killing 1,200, and Israel’s relentless bombardment of Gaza, ...

In August 2023, a special adviser left the Ministry of Defence to become director of strategic engagement at German defence firm Helsing that November. The following February, less than a year after ...

One can make quite a sport of dredging the depths of Tripadvisor, seeking the site’s most exquisite displays of entitlement and pettiness. Consider the luxury Caribbean hotel lambasted because a ...

It is almost midnight at the close of 15th June 2026, and I am standing in the middle of a world that is supposed to be ending, not that anyone nearby seems all that concerned by the prospect. In ...