Features

What will become of Jamaica’s Maroons?

Jamaican police entered farms in the village of Accompong in August to destroy ganja crops. The village chief, carrying a rifle, drove them away. ‘This is a gross disrespect and violation of Maroon territorial jurisdiction,’ said the chief, on his Instagram. Richard Currie talks a lot about sovereignty: he was elected colonel, or chief, on

Why I became a writer

Whenever I give talks to children about my books they always ask who inspired me to be a writer. I don’t really think anyone did. I was playing complicated imaginary games inside my head before I could read, and as soon as I could write I filled many Woolworths notebooks with my wobbly printing. But

The case against Aukus

Just weeks after the denouement of the West’s misadventure in Afghanistan, Boris Johnson is again committing Britain to a risky international venture. Aukus, the naval partnership between the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom, appears to tie Britain to an Indo-Pacific strategy that is militarily and geopolitically flawed. In December 1941, the catastrophic sinking

End of the line: it’s time to rethink the queue

Flying to Kalamata this week, I did my own little bit to reduce the terrible queues at Heathrow Terminal 5. Heroically, I stacked up the grey luggage trays once they’d been emptied by passengers coming through security. As a result, there were more loaded trays for people to pick up, and a smaller tailback of

Wolfgang Münchau

The stalemate election: can Germany move beyond Merkel?

Germany’s election campaign has taken many unexpected turns. In January, Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU), were leading by about 20 percentage points. By April, the Greens were ahead. By July, the CDU/CSU had bounced back, and then all of a sudden, the Social Democrats (SPD) came out of nowhere to a solid lead by last

Julie Burchill

Why do some women find killers irresistible?

Women who fall in love with killers have always fascinated and repulsed me. What drives them? Do they think they can ‘save’ these men? Are they secret sadists, acting by proxy? Are they masochists, getting a cheap thrill from communicating with someone who has tortured a fellow woman to death? Bonnie and Clyde syndrome, also

The myth of Japan’s warrior spirit

Should we fear a new martial spirit in Japan? Is there a samurai lurking inside those armies of grey-suited corporate men waiting to spring forth? Even though Japan’s constitution, drawn up by the Americans after the war, forbids military combat abroad, the fear of a Japanese militarist revival has never quite gone away, especially in

Now I’m a backbencher, I’m free to speak my mind

Politicians are supposed to have a survival instinct. Mine didn’t kick in last week, so I had no idea that my evidence session to a House of Lords committee on Wednesday would be my swan song. I was speaking about the work of the Ministry of Justice, where I had been lord chancellor for two

Are NFTs memes – or masterpieces?

You may think you have experienced buyer’s remorse. But until you’ve splashed out £4,000 on a Jpeg, you have not. That’s where I found myself the other day, after an adrenalin-fuelled afternoon bidding on a digital collectible ‘card’ depicting the Mona Lisa sitting on an easel. The item in question is a Curio Card, one

Payday: who’s afraid of rising wages?

During the Brexit referendum, Stuart Rose, the former boss of Marks & Spencer, and chair of the Remain campaign, claimed that if Britain left the EU, wages ‘will go up’. This was, he added, in a rare moment of candour, ‘not necessarily a good thing’. But the idea that salaries might rise was exactly the

Why Brits like me have abandoned trucking

I became a trucker by default. It was the 1980s and I was working three jobs just to pay the mortgage and keep my family going. I was a milkman, a taxi driver and a barman and I was tired and bored. We were living in a town with a ferry link to France and

Kabul is now a city of the dead

I lived in Kabul for nearly ten years. I had a house there for many years and I loved being there. I loved the sense of life on the edge — even at the risk of sudden death — and the extraordinary array of interesting people who visited. I later became a partner in a

Last rights: assisted suicide is neither painless nor dignified

Is euthanasia painless? The founder of the British pro-euthanasia movement (and sometime eugenicist) Dr Killick Millard declared in 1931 that his aim was ‘to substitute for the slow and painful death a quick and painless one’. His sentiment is echoed today by the pro-euthanasia group My Death, My Decision, which says that it wants the

Assetocracy: the inversion of the welfare state

To understand how the Tories ended up in such a muddle about who they are and what they stand for, take a walk down any of the nicer streets in Boris Johnson’s constituency. North Hillingdon is as idyllic now as it was a generation ago: spacious houses, with large drives, built before the war. The

Can cartoons be both funny – and diverse?

Of the many challenges cartoonists face — rejection, money, drink, or lack of — one of the trickiest is the growing pressure to depict diversity. Nowadays readers often write to publications complaining about the dearth of ethnic minorities in our drawings and demand for cartoons to be more inclusive. It’s like being trapped in a