“I almost worship him as if he were a god. I have never felt such an extravagant admiration for anybody.” So the 22-year-old Bertrand Russell wrote to his fiancée Alys Pearsall Smith in November 1894.

Ryan Gilbey, long one of the UK’s most astute and exuberant critics, is not so sure. “Subtext is now text – and greater visibility can feel like a diminished presence,” he writes in his newly ...

Why did Trump almost win? His presidency has seen many disasters. But when campaigning, Trump saw an opportunity that Biden didn't—and it proved crucial ...

If you have turned on the radio, listened to a political podcast or flicked through a newspaper of late, you will have noticed excited chatter about something called Blue Labour. Its primary ...

Keir Starmer once stood up for protesters. Now he calls them terrorists As a human rights lawyer, Starmer defended direct action on grounds of conscience. But the world is now a much less forgiving ...

In this week’s Q&A, Alan and Lionel are asked where they go for analysis of the situation in the Middle East, including the Israel-Iran war.

What is the first news event you can recall? I think I was woken up to watch the moon landings. I was three. But it might be a more general memory of watching blurry moon stuff—the space race was an ...

The problem is that I already feel permanently guilty about owning too many books for my very small cottage. My passion (or should I say addiction?) goes back to my first life, in the Soviet Union, ...

This week’s guest on Media Confidential is Anthony Scaramucci, financier and former communications director at the White House. He now co-hosts The Rest is Politics US podcast. Anthony argues that the ...

The antithesis of trickle-down economics is education In our unequal society, not all of us will inherit wealth—but we can all learn ...

If international law suddenly did not exist, what difference would it make? The conduct of Russia and of Israel, among many other countries, currently seems uninhibited by legal norms in general and ...

The number of rebels on the government’s disability benefit overhaul has now reached a point where passage of the plans depends on ministers winning some of them back. The thrust of the emerging charm ...