Like many Britons born in the 1980s, the journalist and Guardian columnist Owen Jones came of age with Tony Blair’s platitudes ringing in his ears. Politics at the turn of the millennium... Read more »
In times of crisis, there is one person to whom the left still turns for guidance. More than a decade and a half after leaving government, Gordon Brown has mellowed into the... Read more »
American presidents have struggled to get the measure of Vladimir Putin. When George W Bush met him in 2001, he reported that he had “looked the man in the eye”, got a... Read more »
In 2009, the tech billionaire Peter Thiel published an essay with the portentous title The Education of a Libertarian, in which he announced: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”... Read more »
“At what precise moment had Peru fucked itself up?” Those words on the opening page of Conversation in the Cathedral announced the arrival of a writer who understood that national history could become... Read more »
When Sandra Forsyth began marching in support of the English Defence League, her daughter Nicola Wilding hoped it was a phase. The Cumbria-bred, Dover-dwelling Sandra was about to turn 60 and had... Read more »
‘Continental people have sex lives; the English have hot-water bottles.” So observed Hungarian journalist George Mikes in How to Be an Alien (1946), one of the finest examples of a tradition in which... Read more »
Jill Biden recalled the immense pressure that Joe Biden faced in the aftermath of his disastrous 2024 debate performance, saying he told her “Jilly, I had no choice,” following his decision to... Read more »
Despite shortening attention spans, people are “still reading novels”, said the writer Elif Shafak at a panel event on the Guardian’s list of the 100 best novels ever published in English, which... Read more »