The Week

Leading article

What Turkey needs

This week’s earthquake in Turkey and northern Syria is a reminder that in spite of civilisation’s advance and human ingenuity, there are natural disasters we can do little to prevent or to protect ourselves from. Though the death toll from floods, drought and storms has fallen dramatically over the past century, the toll from tsunamis,

Portrait of the week

Diary

Tristram Hunt: How to repatriate art

At the start of last year, the Leopard Inn in Burslem, the scene of the celebrated meeting between potter Josiah Wedgwood and engineer James Brindley to agree the navigation of the Trent and Mersey Canal, ‘went on fire’. Close by, the Wedgwood Institute, founded by William Gladstone in 1863 as a design school, and proudly

Ancient and modern

Plato, Aristotle and the power of music

A fast-food restaurant in Wrexham will play classical music during the evenings in a bid to stop antisocial behaviour. While some ancient Greeks denied that music per se provided anything for you apart from an unimportant kind of pleasure (though the words of a song might make a difference), others thought that music could have

Barometer

Who first floated the idea of spy balloons?

Something in the air A US fighter plane shot down a Chinese surveillance balloon which had drifted across Canada and the US. Balloons have a long history in military operations, being deployed widely in the American Civil War and in the Siege of Paris in 1870, when they were used to get messages out of

Letters

Letters: How to stop the Ukraine war

A negotiated end Sir: Owen Matthews’s piece hinted at the likely outcome of the Ukraine conflict, but his conclusion was too pessimistic (‘Spring loaded’, 4 February). It seems probable that the war in Ukraine will drag on without a decisive conclusion and that there will not only be disagreement among Nato members about supplying further