Features

My invitation to meet King Arthur

I am in Charleston, South Carolina, whither we fly to escape the northern winter, which so far has not been too frigid. Charleston is anything but frigid. Last week we attended a cocktail party and I overheard two elegant ladies who were discussing a gentleman glimpsed across the candlelit courtyard. One remarked on his good

A toast to the old man pub

I’ve always preferred ‘old man pubs’ to bars, old man pubs being the kind decked out in mahogany and offering up a gin and tonic to anyone clueless enough to ask for a cocktail. Having just moved to Glasgow, I find myself surrounded by these sorts of places, Scotland practically being the home of pubs

Macron’s last adventure: the President vs the public

Montpellier Every generation or so, French politics is decided on the streets. The May 1968 unrest in Paris spread worldwide; Jacques Chirac’s welfare reform agenda was ended with the 1995 disturbances. The spirit of revolt is so alive in French society that a special police force exists for such occasions, specialising in crowd control. Now

Lisa Haseldine

David Kezerashvili: ‘Georgia is a proxy of the Russian state’

David Kezerashvili knows better than most what standing up to Russia entails. He helped to overthrow the Kremlin-aligned Georgian government during the 2003 Rose Revolution. Then he served as Georgia’s defence minister for two years including when Russia invaded in 2008. He eventually fled to London in 2012 when the Kremlin-backed Georgian Dream government accused

Getting a job after 50 is easier said than done

I am fed up with the government claiming that half a million professionals aged over 50 are reluctant to get back to work. They make it sound like we’re all on cruises, gardening or watching telly. But have they actually tried getting a job after the age of 50? I’m not doing nothing, I hasten

The decline and fall of urban America

They’re calling it ‘revenge travel’: the desire to make up for the touring opportunities we all lost when we were locked down in our pandemical homes. As a keen professional traveller, I confess I’ve got a fearsome case of this bug: I’ve spent the past 20 months going just about anywhere I can, playing catch

Ross Clark

What David Attenborough’s ‘Wild Isles’ doesn’t tell you

It is not just Gary Lineker, apparently, who has fallen victim to sinister right-wing forces at the BBC. A follow-up programme to David Attenborough’s BBC1 series Wild Isles, focusing on the decline of UK wildlife, will not be shown on terrestrial television but only made available on iPlayer. ‘The decision has angered the programme-makers and

The ebb and flow of life on a houseboat

In the spring of 2021 I took a man to a pub in Hackney and bought him a drink. Perhaps he should have been doing the buying, since I had just handed him a large sum in return for his narrowboat. But I was in an exultant mood. No London flat, I reasoned, could ever

The mild-mannered economist who could end Erdogan’s rule

In modern Turkey, as in ancient Byzantium, the factions and passions of the stadium crowds are a key bellwether of the people’s true mood. Last month the terraces of Istanbul’s Sukru Saracoglu stadium – home to the Fenerbahce team of which Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been a proud member for 25 years –

Ian Williams

ChatCCP: how will China cope with AI?

The Chinese Communist party faces a conundrum: it wants to lead the world in artificial intelligence and yet it is terrified of anything with a mind of its own. Chinese regulators have reportedly told domestic tech companies not to offer their users ChatGPT, the Microsoft-funded chatbot that can provide seemingly well-researched answers to pretty much

What economic crisis comes next?

As we come to the end of an era in which money was practically free, the big question is what the fallout will be from rising interest rates. It isn’t difficult to spot possible problems. Many governments look vulnerable. There are concerns about the UK, where the national debt is now equivalent to roughly 100

Kate Andrews

Crash test: the new era of economic uncertainty

Why did nobody see it coming? When the late Queen asked this question about the crash of 2008, on a visit to a London business school, no one had a clear answer. Why, in a financial world crawling with regulators, did no one spot that subprime mortgages were toxic, on the brink of falling apart?