Septuagenarians behaving badly: Stockholm, by Noa Yedlin, reviewed
Four elderly people conspire, for different reasons, to keep the death of their friend a secret until he’s safely awarded the expected Nobel Prize for Economics
Has Germany finally shaken off its dark past?
‘When it comes to helping others, we are the world champions’, one politician declared in 2015. But Merkel’s welcome to immigrants was pragmatic – and anti-Semitism is on the rise again
How dangerous is the Sunni-Shia schism?
What unites the two groups is more fundamental than what divides them, says Barnaby Rogerson, and the more serious conflict among Muslims concerns ethnicity and language
What Shakespeare meant to the Bloomsbury Group
Virginia Woolf’s mind was ‘agape & red & hot’ when reading him, and he was an everyday companion to most of the Group – but what they couldn’t bear was to see the plays acted
Dark days in Wales: Of Talons and Teeth, by Niall Griffiths, reviewed
At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution a mountain is being hollowed out for mining, and everyone is covered in mud or worse in this memorable and highly original novel
Why were masters of the occult respected but witches burnt?
Anthony Grafton discusses five celebrated scholars, beginning with Dr Faustus, who separated ‘good’ magic from ‘bad’ in their studies of alchemy, astrology and conjuration
Must we live in perpetual fear of being named and shamed?
Current wars, Brexit and Trumpism have sucked us into a vortex of outrage and disgrace, says David Keen – while advertisers make us feel guilty for being too fat or just poor
Why are the Japanese so obsessed with the cute?
Some see it as a way of appearing harmless after the second world war – but an infantile delight in frolicking animals dates back to at least the 12th century
The freedom fighters who dared to take on a communist superpower
Shibani Mahtani and Timothy McLaughlin describe the courage of the youthful protest leaders in Hong Kong who sacrificed so much for the cause of democracy
The Reform party is just another Thatcherite redux
What exactly does the Reform party stand for? Helpfully, its leader Richard Tice gave a press conference on Wednesday at which he…
Biden’s phony January 6 memorialization
It’s fright month in Joe Biden’s America, folks. Today, January 5, the president will travel to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, to…
‘Who’ matters
Perhaps the only positive to come from the Israel-Hamas war and its upheavals is that it has opened up space for an…
Why the left poses a greater threat to American civic order
Over a leg of lamb, I joined five other expat Americans for Christmas. Our topic du jour was which faction in our…
Brewing truth: climate doomsayers’ cooked-up coffee crisis
Every day, people across the world wake up to news about climate change affecting their lives. With the seeming randomness…
The trouble with Armando Iannucci
Armando Iannucci is a bit of a mystery to me. With shows like The Day Today and The Thick of It, he created…
Bowen’s homemade recipe for an energy debacle
Rewiring the nation won’t happen by rewriting history. Markets work best through light regulation and promoting competition. Government has a…
When will Rory Stewart’s time come?
Can a dose of moral earnestness revive Tory fortunes? This is the question raised by Rory Stewart’s recent memoir, Politics…
Oscar Pistorius should still be in prison
The murderer Oscar Pistorius was released from prison on parole today, more than a decade after shooting his girlfriend, Reeva…
Biden’s cynical attempt to memorialise 6 January
It’s fright month in Joe Biden’s America, folks. Today, 5 January, the US President will travel to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania,…
Claudine Gay may be gone, but the issues on campus remain
Claudine, we hardly knew ye. Gay’s tenure atop Harvard was the shortest in that university’s history. Yet it was still…
In defence of ‘fat cat’ chief executives
Are chief executives overpaid? The High Pay Centre thinks so. Every January, it releases data showing the huge inequality between…
Sunak plays it safe with election announcement
Rishi Sunak is – not unusually – playing it safe by saying his ‘working assumption’ is that the election will…
20 years since John Howard’s renewable energy policy
It is now just over 20 years since John Howard introduced a renewable energy policy which required wind/solar-generated electricity to…
When will Nigel Farage get off the fence?
Nigel Farage’s indecision continues. Despite being hyped in advance as a major unveiling of the rebel party’s programme, Reform UK’s…
Green Day: the end of punk rock
Green Day’s middle-aged, middle-finger to middle America shows the band known for political irreverence has become politically irrelevant. Once anti-establishment…
