Some people hunger for thrillers. Others feast on true-crime podcasts. My underrated source of tales of mind-boggling malfeasance is the ‘Scams’ section of the Guardian’s money pages, where no gimmicks are required. Here are stories of deception to chill the …
How The Sun won the Falklands War
Pride of place in my breakfast room in my home is a large sculpture that I commissioned to celebrate The Sun’s controversial Gotcha headline which followed the news that we had sunk the Argentine navy’s cruiser the General Belgrano.…
Octopus farms are the future
When the Spanish seafood firm Nueva Pescanova recently announced its plan to open the world’s first octopus farm, many animal rights activists (and the wider public) reacted with horror. Taking intelligent creatures from the wild to exploit them for human …
Does Prince Andrew deserve forgiveness?
The Queen must have known that choosing Prince Andrew to accompany her down the aisle at Westminster Abbey would bring her little but condemnation. “Still a sweaty nonce” was one such response on Twitter, charmingly expressing what many might nonetheless …
Britain needed the Falklands War
On the morning of Monday, 5 April 1982, the aircraft carrier Invincible slipped its moorings and eased into Portsmouth Harbour, bound for the South Atlantic. It was barely ten o’clock, yet the shoreline was packed with tens of thousands of …
Ukraine has split the far-Right
Toby Cook was a 19-year-old with a history of mental health problems, a growing recreational drink and drug habit, and a mounting sheet of criminal charges when he decided to leave his native Australia and travel to Ukraine in 2018. …
Why Russians hated the Nineties
The Nineties were a time of American hegemony and British cockiness. The internet was a utopian idea as opposed to a collective psychological disorder. Climate change, terrorism, autocracy and gross inequality were either not-on-the-radar or assumed to be moving in …
Putin has made Nato stronger
War is the domain of paradox, contradiction, and boundless surprise. It is not merely because of ignorance or stupidity that military history is a record of crimes, follies, defeats, and very few victories worth their cost. Even so, the Ukraine …
Boris Johnson is no clown
There is a secret pact between the aristocrat and the anarchist. The anarchist dislikes rules, while the aristocrat can afford to ignore them. Kicking over the traces is proof of his authority, not of his criminality. Those who set the …
We are all Teletubbies now
Is children’s TV programming actually made for ravers? It’s a long time since my last pharmacologically-assisted all-nighter, but I have vivid memories of watching programming aimed at the under-fives at breakfast time, having not yet been to bed.
The bright …
What we get wrong about appeasement
Much about the war in Ukraine has been unpredictable. Entirely predictable, though, has been the way stories from history have been mobilised by politicians and pundits to offer “lessons” about the crisis there: why it has occurred, what its consequences …
Why Hong Kong can’t escape Covid
“Young men, starting out in life, have often asked me ‘How can I become an Internee?’ Well, there are several methods. My own was to buy a villa in Le Touquet on the coast of France and stay there till …
The myth of the black role model
It’s not easy being good. Living in a $42 million home, being worth $350 million, and stepping up to accept the greatest award of your career is no mean feat. Maybe, just maybe, we caught Will Smith at a bad …
Erdogan’s Turkey won’t save Ukraine
The Bayraktar Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) TB2 looks like the malformed lovechild of a small plane and a large, angry wasp. But if the armed drone looks weird, there’s nothing strange about its performance. Over the past few weeks, the …
Inside China’s fiction factories
“I want to influence the world with China’s intellectual property.” This is the great ambition of Tang Jia San Shao, 41, who wants to build the “Disney World of China” — a gigantic theme park inspired by his stories. But …