Inside India’s Potemkin election

Always a rather grubby affair, as if put together by minimally competent quiet quitters, Indian democracy is now in serious trouble. To be sure, its formalistic trappings remain in place. Nearly a billion Indians will file into polling stations starting …

The man who betrayed El Chapo

“Of all the drug lords I had business relationships with, [El Chapo] was probably the most difficult one,” Margarito Flores tells me. Over years, Flores and his twin, Pedro, distributed 60 tonnes of cocaine, as well as heroin and crystal …

This book will send you to Hell

Last autumn, I finally read a book I’d put off reading for years because I suspected (rightly, it turns out) that it would be uniquely harrowing. Jonathan Littell’s notorious, extremely long novel of the Second World War, The Kindly Ones, …