There was once a ruler who was displeased with a handful of legislators and so he sought to arrest them for treason. But the attempt failed and became instead a symbolic moment, showing the limits of ...

When Sir Jim Ratcliffe, billionaire founder of Ineos, resident of Monaco and co-owner of Manchester United, told Sky News last week that the UK had been “colonised by immigrants”, he tapped into a ...

There is no British cultural event that bears reasonable comparison to the annual Super Bowl halftime performance. No Glastonbury headline slot, Last Night of the Proms or Jools Holland Hootenanny can ...

If Keir Starmer had someone like Gordon Brown or Boris Johnson as chancellor or foreign secretary, I suspect a Labour leadership election would now be underway. But he doesn’t, and the absence of an ...

It’s mid-morning at Hadrian’s Wall and the Romans have already lost again. Not to the Picts this time, or to the weather, or even to the slow grind of history. But to Lee Anderson. “Now this is what a ...

Unless you have a mind open to paradox, Jesus was a sissy. It’s taken a lot of effort over the years to claim him as a man’s man. Jesus, in the gospels, is not what we, or for that matter, the ancient ...

The “Wagatha Christie” case requires at least three things to be explained. The first is how, in legal and practical terms, Colleen Rooney won and Rebekah Vardy lost. And to understand this, we can ...

When a young Russian singer suggested to Tchaikovsky in 1877 that he compose an opera based on Eugene Onegin, Alexander Pushkin’s famous novel-in-verse, he dismissed it as a “crazy” idea. “Then, ...

When Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney declared at Davos last week that “the old order is not coming back,” the global reaction varied sharply. In Europe, as the Economist noted in a piece aptly ...

“Less Holocaust, more Anne Frank,” was the advice Michael Grunwald received from the CEO of a publishing house who opted not to bid for his latest book, We Are Eating the Earth. Grunwald took notice.

For years, debates about Iran have revolved around a single question: Will the regime fall? Amid intensifying protest and economic pressure, this question has regained urgency. History, however, ...

There is no time more miserable than 4pm on a gloomy Sunday afternoon in January. It is the devil’s own hour, a witching hour, when one’s life appears at its worst, and even the smallest stresses and ...