Writing about financial crises by John Lanchester, Deborah Friedell, Joseph Stiglitz, Richard Rudgley, Robert Brenner and Jonathan Steinberg.
If it occurred to the home secretary, Priti Patel, or the minister for ‘immigration compliance’, Chris Philp, that an army barracks wasn’t the best place for refugees who...
Unlike planets, asteroids have no atmosphere and much less energy is needed to lift materials off their surfaces. In December, a Japanese mission returned to Earth with the first samples taken from below . . .
On 17 February, Bloomberg reported that perhaps as many as fifteen million people in Texas had lost electricity, in ‘undoubtedly the largest forced blackout in US history’. There had . . .
If Scots sometimes seem unduly exasperated with Brexiter nationalism, it isn’t just because they voted heavily against Brexit. Nor, in the case of Scottish unionists, is it simply a consequence . . .
Last month, Michael Gove dispatched Ian Paisley Junior, the Democratic Unionist Party MP for North Antrim, with brutal indifference. Brexit was done, the DUP had been done over, and everyone could . . .
By comparison with the scale of the upheaval through which Brazil has lived in the last five years, and the gravity of its possible outcome, the histrionics over Brexit in this country and the conniptions over Trump in America are close to much ado about nothing.
Environmentalism might have looked like a bourgeois playground to Edward Said. The Israeli state has long coated its nation-building project in a green veneer.
The government has stopped short of explicitly declaring war on the poor, but how different would the situation be if it had?
In 1992, a year after the first Gulf War, I heard Dick Cheney, then secretary of defense, say that the US had been wise not to invade Baghdad and get ‘bogged down in the problems of trying...
In The Color of Truth*, the American scholar Kai Bird presents his study of McGeorge (‘Mac’) and William Bundy. These were the two dynastic technocrats who organised and...
That capitalism unobstructed by public regulations, cartels, monopolies, oligopolies, effective trade unions, cultural inhibitions or kinship obligations is the ultimate engine of economic growth...
Now that some of the euphoria has lifted, it is possible to re-examine the Israeli-PLO agreement with the required common sense. What emerges from such scrutiny is a deal that is more flawed and,...
A lot of people throughout Europe have suddenly realised that they know hardly anything about the Maastricht Treaty while rightly sensing that it could make a huge difference to their lives....
In recent times in Ireland we have been reminded of a lot of anniversaries. Remembering the past is something of an obsession here. The future, discussing it or shaping it, doesn’t seem...
Writing about financial crises by John Lanchester, Deborah Friedell, Joseph Stiglitz, Richard Rudgley, Robert Brenner and Jonathan Steinberg.
Writing about constitutional crises by Bernard Porter, Ferdinand Mount, Hilary Mantel, Alan Bennett, Blair Worden, Patricia Beer, Stephen Sedley and Sionaidh Douglas-Scott.
Worst-case scenarios for democracy - especially since Trump's victory - hark back to how democracy has failed in the past. So do we really risk a return to the 1930s?
Adam Tooze examines an alternative, counterintuitive vision of America, as a power defying gravity.
David, Helen and other Talking Politics regulars gather the morning after the Tory triumph the night before to discuss how they did it and what it means.
We catch up with Gary Gerstle and Helen Thompson about the state of the Trump presidency, from impeachment and cover-ups to Syria and Ukraine.
We hear David's thoughts on why so many people - including podcasts like this one! - keep calling elections wrong.
James Meek argues that the Robin Hood myth has been turned on its head by the wealthiest and most powerful, so that those who were previously considered 'poor' are now accused of wallowing in luxury.
David Runciman reflects on Trump, Brexit and threats to democracy, with some help from Alexis de Tocqueville.
Economist Ann Pettifor talks to Grace Blakeley about the origins of the Green New Deal, and why we need it.
Reformers said that non-smokers took fewer sick days, fewer breaks; they rarely referred to smoking as a public health problem that might have something to do with class and racial in equality,...
As Navalny points out, Putin’s private domain is more than thirty times the size of Monaco. But unlike Monaco, it is protected by a no-fly zone and a naval security order requiring ships to stay...
What do we do with all that history – all that rage, all these memories? A young soldier with a slender face. Bruised and beaten men in the back of a truck. The site of a prison, a plaque on a wall....
To cheers of ‘Viva Castro! Viva Cuba!’ the delegation took up position at the Hotel Theresa in Harlem, which became a kind of opposition headquarters during the UN session. Malcolm X was the...
Tony Blair’s long-winded memoir A Journey (2010) is strikingly light on self-recrimination. He regrets ‘with every fibre of my being’ the hundreds of thousands of deaths in...
Why have people’s political identities become so deeply determined by whether they went to university and how they define ‘racism’? Why these markers and not others? This may be a question...
In an email to staff shortly before his murder, Samuel Paty explained that his class was meant to confront students with the following question: should cartoons of the Prophet not be published in order...
It’s unlikely that IS will ever be able to resurrect itself as it once was. It is too feared; it made too many enemies. It has lost the advantage of surprise and probably of covert support from foreign...
Although anxiety about the court is spreading, there is little chance that major reforms – the end of life tenure, for instance, or substantial enlargement of the number of justices – will...
To call the explosion of the mob that took over the Capitol building an attempted coup, or an insurrection, is unfair to the plotters of coups and insurrections. Like the man who egged them on in a speech...
The European Union, as it has come to take shape, speaks continuously of democracy and the rule of law, even as it negates them. No ill intention need be ascribed to it. What it has become was inscribed...
Race, Isabel Wilkerson claims, is ‘a recent phenomenon in human history’, deriving from the Spanish word raza (in the context of the Atlantic slave trade), and ‘caste’ the much...
Can democracy, sovereignty and globalisation be happily combined? What American examples show is that European elites must make a choice, opting either for political union at the cost of national sovereignty,...
Like Jerry Seinfeld and LeBron James, Obama exemplifies what can be done by super-talented individuals in a winner-take-all world. He won and did indeed take it all, including the $65 million he and Michelle...
Sasha Swire has lived her whole life in the densely interconnected world of Conservative Party politics, and her decision to publish her diaries, as well as transcripts of private text and WhatsApp messages...
The EU of today is neither the creation of a revolution, nor does it enjoy any homogeneity of culture or language, nor is it united by the intoxicating prospect of expansion. Moreover, and decisively,...
‘You’re not the only one,’ a friend assured me, and sent me screenshots of other people who couldn’t change their dresses or remove their ties until the official call came. At best,...
Donald Trump’s press conference on 5 November, in which he claimed he had won the election and said there had been mass voter fraud, was like a scene from a dystopian movie. His...
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