With September marking a decade since the Lehman Brothers implosion, stand by for a slew of economic retrospectives. Any meaningful analysis, though, needs to get beyond historic balance sheets and plunging share price graphs — however dramatic the data. For the most significant impact of the biggest financial and economic upheaval since the Great Depression
Uppsala, Sweden When I dropped off my kids at school early last week, I noticed that -another parent’s car was covered in ash — it had been parked in a garage where arsonists had been at work, attacking scores of vehicles. His Volvo had got away: just. ‘My car can be cleaned,’ the father told
Democrats will face a dilemma if they win control of the House of Representatives in November’s midterm elections. Should they impeach President Trump over the Russia affair? Or should they impeach him over the Stormy Daniels porn-star payoff? Or should they impeach him over something else? There’s no doubt the party’s base of voters is
When Muslims make headlines, it’s invariably for the wrong reasons. The fuss over Boris Johnson’s burka joke is a case in point: he was making an argument in defence of Muslims, but was instead condemned for attacking us. Why the confusion? Because of how little our faith is understood. Let’s start with the burka. Islam
It may seem odd that a cabal of politicians, celebrities and millionaires can successfully present themselves as a great democratic force and seek to overturn Brexit, Britain’s vote to leave the European Union. But the people behind the People’s Vote have one big advantage: their opponents are in disarray. Vote Leave ceased campaigning after the
I got some bad news this week. I discovered that I’m a ‘privileged, white male’. It was my agent who broke it to me. We were talking about the trouble he’s having in finding a publisher for my book — a work of non-fiction — when the following exchange took place. Me: What’s wrong with
When I went to see V.S. Naipaul in hospital last week he was feeling marginally better. His wife Nadira had arranged for a violinist to play some Mozart to him, helping him relax. She did not allow too many visitors. This was not the first time he had been in hospital. His health had been
My friend recently met a man on a dating app and went out for dinner with him. When he arrived, the man announced that he didn’t drink. Nothing unusual about that: plenty of young men are abstemious these days. His next declaration was more surprising: he didn’t eat. Instead, he lived off something called ‘Huel’.
If ever you find yourself bored and with 15 minutes to spare, I recommend looking up Pornhub’s annual report, the closest thing you will get to a statistical breakdown of the planet’s libido. Here you will discover that the average visit to Pornhub lasts nine minutes 59 seconds; that the most popular time to watch
‘It could be argued that getting out of the office to beat up some leftists is a good way to work up an appetite for lunch,’ one of France’s more cynical millionaires tells me, admiring Alexandre Benalla, 26, a recently fired security aide to President Emmanuel Macron. Benalla had rushed from his office at the
Sydney For decades, Australia has been known as ‘the lucky country’. At the end of the world geographically, we are separated from the global troublespots by vast oceans. We have recorded 27 years of uninterrupted growth, partly because of a surge in exports of commodities to China. At the same time, our tough border protection
I was worried that going to the autonomous vehicle exhibition in Stuttgart would be tantamount to an atheist walking into St Peter’s while the Pope was conducting a mass. There is something religious about the fervour with which adherents to the driverless credo practise their faith and promise us a new kingdom. Their proselytising has
How we love our homes: we make them cosy and secure, protected from the outside world, defended by locks, bolts and burglar alarms. But we haven’t always had our own private dwellings, and under the invasive influence of the internet, home, as we’ve come to understand it, may well soon be a thing of the
‘There. I said it.’ That phrase, and the attitude it strikes, says something pretty specific. It doesn’t just say: here’s what I think. It says: ‘Here’s what I think, and, you know what? It’s what nobody except me dares to say in public.’ It says: I’m brave. It says: I speak truth to power. It
Americans traumatised by their current president could be forgiven for thinking that his demand for a ‘space force’ was about protecting the country from aliens. Aliens, that is, of extraterrestrial persuasion, not the ones currently hurling themselves against the southern border. What, really, is implausible these days? As baseball savant Yogi Berra said when told
Britain seems to be following America down a dangerous path. There’s your politician David Lammy accusing Oxford and Cambridge of racial bias — and refusing to listen when they point out they simply accept whoever gets top grades. Then there’s the author Lionel Shriver, pilloried because she dared to suggest (in this magazine) that privileging
Dear 2016 WriteNow mentees, Thanks so much for your open letter to me. It seems only good manners for me to write back. You’re rightly proud of having been admitted to a challenging programme at Penguin Random House that mentors gifted young minority authors and helps to cultivate their talents. My own publisher, HarperCollins, runs
When the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu visited London in 1978, the British government did some serious sucking up. Ceausescu was an egomaniac and possibly crazy. When he went hunting outside Bucharest, his body-guards shot game with machine guns so he could be photographed at the end of the day with a shoulder-high pile of dead
Sexual intercourse, Philip Larkin famously wrote, began in 1963. And listening to contemporary commentators, you’d think that it came to an end in 2017 with the birth of the #MeToo movement. For these voices of doom, the end of the erotic is nigh; Britain is on the brink of sexual apocalypse. The recent news that
This is Putin’s time. Next week, the Fifa World Cup kicks off in Moscow, and the Kremlin has spared no expense to showcase Vladimir Putin’s new Russia as a vibrant, safe and strong nation. Half a million visitors will be welcomed — with the Russian press reporting that the notorious ‘Ultra’ hooligans have been officially
