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 »
For some years now, mainstream British politics has revolved increasingly obsessively around the question of how to stop Nigel Farage. What started a decade ago with Brexit may yet end in a general election... Read more »