You have to wonder what Indian PM Narendra Modi, guest of honour at the Champs-Elysées military parade today, will be making of the political fever in France. The tremulous mood was captured well in his counterpart Elisabeth Borne’s recent interview …
At Nato, America recaptured Europe
It is now clear that the Russian invasion of Ukraine marked the end of one era in world politics and the beginning of a new one. As with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the collapse of détente …
Should Huw Edwards have been named?
The Yewtree investigations into historic sexual offences by public figures changed two things about the British relationship with celebrity. First, it made us more suspicious of it: the nice men in your living room had in several cases, it turned …
The Asian-American class war
In the metropolises of the West, shops that sell bubble tea — or boba, as it is commonly known — have proliferated over the past few years, a microcosm of the boom in East Asian cultural exports. At the same …
How the mob turned on Huw Edwards
I was at the BBC on Wednesday afternoon when the news broke that Huw Edwards was the person everyone has been speculating about. I could tell something was afoot, as the newsroom started rushing around, in anticipation of some incoming …
Milan Kundera’s last joke
Milan Kundera had the questionable good fortune to live through what seemed like the historic victory of his defence of the individual against the state — only to see his life’s work become shockingly relevant again before his death on …
Is Casey DeSantis the next Jackie Kennedy?
The critics of Casey DeSantis, wife to Republican presidential hopeful, Ron, can’t decide which derogatory stereotype they think best describes her. She’s been everything from a conniving Lady Macbeth in the carapace of a Disney princess, to a wannabe glamour …
Starmer should beware a Left-wing insurgency
Have Labour’s strategists achieved the impossible? Not only is the party 20 points ahead and in with a shot of winning four by-elections, but, perhaps even more impressively, its leader finally appears to be shrugging off his custardy sheen of …
The Prigozhin copycats are coming for Putin
Kremlinology is like reading tea leaves or astrology. It is closer to an art than a science — little is as it seems, and what information does trickle out has often only been released to service further palace intrigue. Nearly …
The death games of Ukraine
Down in a bunker a little way back from the Ukraine frontline, I am watching a staple of modern warfare: a drone attack in real time.
The command centre is a small room with three TV monitors, two of which …
Do Geordies want to be Vikings?
Geordies, it is said, “have long wished to be Vikings”. So some among us might have looked north with envy last week. It’s not often that Orcadian irredentists make international headlines, but the suggestion that the Orkneys might be reunited …
Gavin Newsom: the President nobody needs
For many Democrats, Gavin Newsom has become an object of desire. Aged 55, the Governor of California’s relative youth, coiffed good looks and ability to speak in something close to coherent English contrasts with their bumbling leader, whom as many …
Why Trudeau got tough on immigration
“To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength #WelcomeToCanada.” In hindsight, this tweet by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2017 was ill-advised. It was written in response to …
The unbearable lightness of being cancelled
Forty years ago, if there was one novel you could count on educated readers having read and loved, it was The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera. First published in an English translation in America in 1980, it …
The Nato mindset leads to war
As Nato members and their Asia-Pacific allies convene today to discuss the bloc’s expansion and future strategy, the Ukrainians are destined to be disappointed — insofar as membership is concerned at least. In an interview on Sunday, Biden said it …