When the tanks were rolling into Tiananmen Square and the Cold War hadn’t yet formally come to an end, it seemed obvious: freedom and democracy were prerequisites for economic success. Yet over the past three decades, China has challenged that notion by creating a model previously unknown to the world: consumer capitalism combined with autocratic
Home Boris Johnson, the bookies’ favourite for the leadership of the Conservative party, would, if he became prime minister, ‘show the public sector some love’ said his supporter Matt Hancock. Jeremy Hunt, his rival for the leadership, said: ‘If you’re a sheep farmer in Shropshire or a fisherman in Peterhead… I will mitigate the impact
It has been a spring of party madness in London and New York. I was lucky enough to have several birthday parties thrown for me in both cities, including Evgeny Lebedev’s glamorous soirée at which Nigel Farage announced that he was no longer being served at any pub in Brussels, which may explain why he’s
Rufus Norris, the National Theatre’s artistic director, has revealed that all those tedious ancient plays will from now on be updated with a ‘modern twist’ to ‘bring in a fresh audience’. By way of example, he assures us that the forthcoming reworking of Sophocles’s Philoctetes (409 bc) will still be ‘a very valid Greek play’.
Model hobbies Asked what he did to relax, Boris Johnson claimed that he liked to make model buses. Some others who share his hobby: — Rod Stewart is a keen railway-modeller who claims to have a set the size of a tennis court at his Beverly Hills home. — Jools Holland, Roger Daltrey and Pete
Support for stop and search Sir: Mary Wakefield is rightly exasperated by fatuous comments over police use of stop and search (‘Stop posturing over stop and search’, 29 June). Perhaps this year there will be 200 murders of children by other children. Swamping areas with police is obviously a visible response to the problem, but
