So it’s goodbye climate deniers, hello – and you’ll pardon me for being blunt here – climate bullshitters. The impacts of the climate emergency are now so obvious, only the truly deluded still deny them. Instead, we are at the...
Well, I for one won’t be happy until I see Dominic Cummings in a rattan armchair, looking right at Oprah Winfrey and saying: “Thank you for asking how I am. Not many people have asked if I’m OK.” Ever since Cummings stepped...
Today is Earth Day, which should provide us with an opportunity to pause and confront the awful predicament humanity faces. We eat microplastics, breathe pollution and watch other life-forms decline to extinction. We face intersecting poverty, health, climate and biodiversity crises. Our global predicament...
There’s an old Jewish sketch about a guy who makes a load of money and buys a boat. Resplendent in gold braid or whatever, he says to his father: “Look, I’m a captain now!” “By your wife, you’re a captain,”...
Whatever your thoughts on Prince Philip, it can’t have been easy trudging in the Queen’s shadow all those years. A few careful steps behind, but a galaxy away in status. He famously erupted (“I am nothing but an amoeba”) when at...
‘I shall not say why and how I became, at the age of fifteen, the mistress of the Earl of Craven.” If Jennifer Arcuri’s new, extended account of her sexual adventures can’t compete for ambition or polish with the memoirs of Harriette...
Fresh off the back of the anniversary of the first lockdown, another not-so-auspicious political landmark is looming. On Sunday it will be exactly one year since Keir Starmer claimed victory in the Labour leadership contest, powered to the top job amid a...
It is profoundly difficult to grapple with risks whose stakes may include the global collapse of civilisation, or even the extinction of humanity. The pandemic has shattered our illusions of safety and reminded us that despite all the progress made...
Boris Johnson likes to imagine history pivoting on the palms of heroic individuals. That is the thrust of his 2014 book, The Churchill Factor, which depicts Britain’s wartime leader as a man predestined for greatness by unique qualities in his character....
I’m a hostage, I’m not free … I am enslaved, imprisoned in this jail, my life is not in my hands … I have been by myself in solitary confinement with no trial and no charge.” These are the words...
