Vladimir Putin turned seventy on October 7, but Garry Kasparov was not in the mood for a celebration. The Russian dissident, author and chess grandmaster had been invited to address the community of Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, where, seventy-six years ago, Winston Churchill famously announced the descent of an ‘iron curtain’ across the European
Fourteen years ago, while studying at Yale, I spent a summer working for David Lammy. Office drudgery aside, it was a fantastic experience, nurturing an obsession with British politics, culture and journalism that continues to this day. Over dinner, I mention to David the MP my weekend spent at the home of David Starkey. He
There are many places where a gay Jewish couple wearing yarmulkes wouldn’t feel comfortable walking down the street. I didn’t think west London was one of them. Ambling along Edgware Road to a wedding at the West London Synagogue, however, my partner feels something land on his jacket. At first, he believes it is bird
Donald Trump has a point when he asks, with respect to the tearing down of Confederate statues: ‘Is it George Washington next? You have to ask yourself, where does it stop?’. The reason he has a point is the rationale being advanced by many advocates for removing such monuments: that the individuals depicted were racist or,
In his fateful interview with Robert Kuttner of The American Prospect, Steve Bannon’s remarks about taking a tougher stand on trade with China, battling his enemies within the administration, and the futility of military action against North Korea generated the most headlines. But it was a widely overlooked comment about identity politics that offers the
You have to admire Bernie Sanders’s chutzpah. For almost the entirety of his over 40-year career in politics, Sanders pointedly abstained from joining the Democratic Party. He is a ‘democratic socialist’, officially registered as an independent, and has never been elected to office as a Democrat, seeing that party as insufficiently collectivist. Sanders only affiliated himself
The centrist Democratic party bequeathed to President Barack Obama by Bill Clinton is not the one he will leave to his successor. By every measure, it is more left-wing, and more populist both in spirit and ideological composition. And this poses serious problems for the campaign of the candidate seen as America’s most likely next
How many more civilian planes need to be shot down over European airspace before Europe’s leaders get serious about the threat posed by Vladimir Putin’s Russia? As the smoke clears from Thursday’s horrific downing of a Malaysian Airlines jet traveling from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, many will try to deflect blame from landing squarely where
Kiev Ihor Miroshnychenko, a parliamentarian from Ukraine’s ultra-nationalist Svoboda (Freedom) party, is an ‘emotional’ man. That is the word that he and his colleagues use to describe his raiding the headquarters of the country’s state television broadcaster last month. Accompanied by five other Svoboda bully boys, Miroshnyschenko berated and beat the station director before forcing
After all the fuss, the billions spent, the calls for boycotts and so on, the Sochi Winter Olympics will begin next week. Given the incredibly low expectations, the Russian Games may even be judged a success — as long as the weather stays cold and no terrorist attack takes place. But Vladimir Putin should not
Many books have been written about the corruption, venality and incestuousness that characterise Washington DC, but none has been as highly anticipated or amusing as This Town. Written by Mark Leibovich, the senior national correspondent for the New York Times magazine, it has been on the minds of Washington’s chattering classes for at least two
In the current issue of the Spectator, I write about Warwick Spinks, a convicted British paedophile who hid in plain sight in Prague for some 15 years. In 1997, having already been released early from a 7-year (later reduced to 5-year) prison sentence delivered in 1995, Spinks violated the terms of his probation and fled
To the British tabloids, he was ‘the Pied Piper of paedophiles’, the UK’s ‘most wanted child abuser’. But we all knew him as Willem: the fat, jolly, occasionally lecherous Dutchman who was a mainstay of Prague’s expatriate gay community. If you visited one of the city’s same-sex watering holes before last August, when Czech police
On July 4, 2009, the day Sarah Palin announced that she would step down from the Governorship of Alaska, the perfect quip popped into my head. As we are wont to do in this age of social media, I immediately logged onto my Facebook account and typed the most famous line from Gerald Ford’s inauguration
