The Cambridge Five: England’s Übermenschen
Who would have thought that Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch would find one of its most remarkable manifestations not among the “blond beasts” of Adolf Hitler’s Aryan fantasies, but…
How to end the Brexit shitshow
In European history, there is a pattern: every 50 or 75 years or so, the international order of its time, the institutions and the ideas, gradually drift out of alignment…
Belfast’s new faultline
Every city is a palimpsest, in the pattern of whose streets and buildings, stories etched in the past remain legible. Even when there has been a careful attempt to forget…
The Thomas Piketty doctrine is already here
Academics need to get out a bit more. That, at least, is the impression one might form from the recently-released report of the Global Justice Project, the fruit of a…
The end of Pax Americana at sea
The Ukrainians have a lot to teach the United States and the Trump administration about naval warfare. Read more The indignity of Gaudí Lego When Russia invaded four years ago,…
Donald Trump: false prophet
The epic disaster that followed Donald Trump’s air assault on Iran was the expression of two extreme likelihoods. One concerned the assault itself, which almost everyone knew would empower the…
My night with the young gay Tories
Sir Michael Fabricant assures me that he isn’t “a teddy bear fetishist”. I glance around the former Conservative MP’s living room at the multiplicity of ursine plushies, each comatosely slouched…
Britain’s Atlantic subordination
Mythology does not record whether Cassandra, whose double curse was the gift of prophecy fated to be ignored, felt at least some glimmers of satisfaction as her city of Troy…
Labour’s battle of ideas
And so, Wes Streeting has fired the first shot in a “battle of ideas” within the Labour Party. Others will call it a civil war. Yet more will ask why…