The most important job of any union is to support its members against bullies. So why has the Society of Authors, a sort of posh union for writers, illustrators and translators, failed to support members who are receiving death threats? In August, J.K. Rowling tweeted her sympathy for Sir Salman Rushdie after his attempted murder.
Twenty-two-year-old Hadis Najafi does not look like a foot soldier in a revolution. In the last film of Najafi alive, it is night and she’s walking down a road in Karaj, her home town, smiling and scrunching up her hair into a ponytail. She is young, blonde and on her way to a demonstration. Najafi
Is Brexit failing? Those who believe it is point to George Eustice, the former Tory environment secretary, who told the Commons last week that the Australia trade deal was a dud. Here was a Brexiteer, a one-time Ukip candidate, saying that the biggest trade deal of the Boris Johnson years was deeply flawed – a
When Vladimir Putin’s troops first invaded Kherson, they marched into Eugene Chykysh’s hipster coffee shop. ‘They all asked for cappuccinos with four sugars,’ Eugene told me. Later, another Kherson resident says that the soldiers who raided his house took ten kilos of sugar from him. Eugene is one of the few Ukrainians in Kherson who
Rishi Sunak has ushered in a new era of austerity, not just Osborne-style spending cuts, but tax hikes as well. His Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, says the plan is not just to balance the books but to control inflation, and so this will be the theme of the Sunak years: Austerity 2.0. Throughout the leadership campaign,
Donald Trump has been running for president for at least a decade. His campaign did not start on 16 June 2015, when he descended that golden escalator in that eponymous tower in New York. It began on 19 November 2012, days after President Barack Obama had defeated Mitt Romney, when Trump registered a trademark application
Ravenna, Italy Silvio Berlusconi believes that he alone can entice his old friend Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table and intends to give it a go before Christmas. The 86-year-old media tycoon and former Italian prime minister wants a peace deal, mediated by him, to be his political swansong. His private jet is already on
Britain appears to be enjoying a surge of entrepreneurialism, with more than 200,000 start-ups registered at Companies House between April and June this year alone. However, while many of these are genuine cases of people taking the plunge and embarking on their dream of opening a tea shop, launching a webinar app or whatever, an
Old people are being stranded in hospital, diagnosed with terrible diseases but unable to recover enough to go home. Dr Adrian Boyle, the new president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, has said that NHS hospitals ‘are like lobster traps… easy to get into but hard to get out of’. Might it not be
Lebanon Abu Hassan puts down his Kalashnikov and reaches into a pocket on his bodywarmer to hand me a small white pill. ‘Here,’ he says in Arabic, ‘a gift. This’ll keep you awake for 48 hours.’ He grins and adds in English: ‘Good sex!’ The pill is Captagon, an amphetamine known as ‘the poor man’s
Santa Claus is coming to town. I know this because I recently spent an evening gift-wrapping empty boxes to decorate his grotto at an upcoming Christmas fair. With most of my grandchildren now in their teens, it’s been a while since I endured the grotto experience and I was interested to know how such a
‘Oh, you’ll hate it, Julia. It’s men talking about cars all the time. Really, really boring. You drive all day, it gets incredibly hot, you’ve got no air-conditioning and then – if and when you make it to your hotel – the men start talking about cars again. It’s awful. Never again.’ This is not
Washington, D.C My local polling station is a Christian Brothers high school set amid football fields and parking lots. On Tuesday a woman who lives on our street was arriving to vote just as I was. She had come from a mandatory ‘active-shooter training session’ at her office. Of course, all shooters are ‘active’. Active shooter
Election night, folks – America decides! Except, it doesn’t. On 8 November 2022, as on 3 November 2020, the polls closed, the votes came in and, er, nobody appeared to have won. Everybody now looks nervously again to the state of Georgia, which is probably too close to call and will be decided in a run-off
It’s not just America that is in the process of rewriting its history and casting itself as patriarchal and oppressive – a similar process is taking place in Scotland. Giants of the Enlightenment such as David Hume are being reimagined as the architects of slavery and the fathers of modern racism. Scotland’s first black professor,
In 1861 an American seed-drill designer named Richard Jordan Gatling created a super-weapon that he believed would bring an end to war. With his hand-cranked, ten-barrel machine-gun, Gatling did for warfare what his contemporary Isaac Singer had done for sewing, bringing mechanisation to a former handcraft. Gatling’s gun fired more than 200 rounds a minute
Keir Starmer’s early leadership was defined by the expulsion of his predecessor. Jeremy Corbyn is no longer a Labour MP and will not be a Labour candidate at the next election. But now another former party leader is quietly defining Starmer’s leadership. This week Ed Miliband, the shadow climate secretary, caused outrage by suggesting that
Having delivered his platitudes on climate change at Cop27, Rishi Sunak returns to a more pressing problem: how to keep Britain’s lights on this winter. Last week it was revealed that the government has been wargaming a ‘reasonable worst-case scenario’ in which blackouts last up to a week. Whether those fears prove unfounded or not,
The war in Ukraine has become a testing ground for new technology, an opportunity to develop weapons and find different ways of fighting. Nations that are supposedly neutral have been sending weapons to the front line to find out just how they work in the heat of battle. This is a relatively new trend in
It was on 2 December 2010, when the boys of the global footballing community were still quaintly playing FIFA 11 on PlayStation 3, that the venue was announced for the football World Cup of 2022. Among the crowds in the great hall of the Fifa headquarters in Zurich on that Thursday were David Beckham, Bill