A stranger has been sending me emails recently. A woman in her eighties who lives in Northumberland. Her messages are full of anecdotes of a life well-lived and reading them is like tripping and ...

The murderous attack this month on worshippers at a Manchester synagogue on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, has left many Jews in Britain with a sense of foreboding. Given the ...

Immigration has always been an excuse or accelerant for far-right terrorism. In the 1940s, the right-wing Jewish terrorist group the Irgun engaged in terrorist acts not out of xenophobia, but to ...

Hand-wringing about the state of reading is rife. Children aren’t reading, (many) adults aren’t reading and universities are contending with “post-literate” students: freshers who have come of age on ...

The Labour government is struggling and the party is divided. Meanwhile, Reform is on the rise, and the Tories are collapsing. What kind of change does Labour need, if it is to get back on track? This ...

Late in life, the 18th-century French liberal thinker Abbé Sieyès was asked what he had done during the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror. He replied, “I ...

Historians will debate for ever and a day why the second Donald Trump government was so much more extreme than his first. So extreme that Trump’s second term, if unchecked, could launch a revolution ...

At the start of the summer, various articles appeared in the press bemoaning the ethnic composition of the population living in public housing in the UK, or even of London itself. I pushed back in a ...

The recently assassinated right-wing activist Charlie Kirk built his celebrity around a table, a sign—“Prove me wrong”—and a formula. On campuses across the United States, he invited students to ...

Do you always have to offer the people you’re reporting on a chance to give their side of the story? In this episode of Media Confidential, Alan and Lionel share when giving the right of reply has ...

I am chopping carrots in a small warehouse in Dunkirk when Mary (not her real name), the middle-aged woman peeling potatoes next to me, asks me what my greatest passion is in life. Perhaps it’s her ...

This week the High Court handed down judgment in what was, from one perspective, a straightforward commercial case. The claimant purchaser had sued a supplier of goods for breach of contract and was ...