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 Kiev Ihor Miroshnychenko, a parliamentarian from Ukraine’s ultra-nationalist Svoboda (Freedom) party, is an ‘emotional’ man. That is the word that he and his colleagues use to describe his raiding the headquarters of the country’s state television broadcaster last month. Accompanied by five other Svoboda bully boys, Miroshnyschenko berated and beat the station director before forcing him to sign a resignation letter. So proud were they of this deed that one of the Svoboda members videotaped the whole confrontation and posted it on YouTube. The proximate cause of Miroshnychenko’s anger was the station’s transmission of a Russian news channel broadcast of a victory concert in Red Square celebrating Moscow’s annexation of Crimea.

As Michael Bloomberg approached the end of his time as Mayor of New York, Americans expected him to run for the White House. He had the money, the profile and the ego to be President. But the problem, as it turned out, was his ambition — he had too much of it to settle for the Oval Office. As he put it: ‘I have my own army, the seventh largest in the world. I have my own state department and I don’t listen to Washington very much.’ His ambition, it turns out, was not to be the next President of the United States. He wants to be Mayor of the World. Bloomberg is deadly serious. Since stepping down last Christmas he has recruited a hit team of government advisers who intend to travel the world giving advice on how to run cities.

‘The US stock market is rigged.’ That’s the j’accuse headline that screams out from Flash Boys, the new book by Michael Lewis. It’s a very big claim, made by America’s foremost financial writer. It’s also a claim that, after years of accumulating evidence, warrants extremely close and sustained official scrutiny. Lewis produced Liar’s Poker, his first bestseller, in 1989 — after a four-year stint as a fresh-from-the-Ivy-League bond dealer at the now defunct firm Salomon Brothers. The book, an insider’s account, brilliantly lampooned the macho, aggressive behaviour of the ‘big swinging dicks’ who paced the carpet-tiled trading floors.

Clarissa Tan, who wrote articles and TV reviews for The Spectator, has died of cancer aged 42. She came to London from Singapore after winning this magazine’s Shiva Naipaul prize for travel writing and over the next seven years wrote about a great many things: Asia, race and the East; also smartphones, Sienna and socks. Clarissa paid attention to prose and all her pieces were beautiful and funny but, perhaps most unusually, they rang true. She was much loved by all at The Spectator and we miss her. Here is her prize-winning piece.    I wish to write about a place of which I know everything yet nothing, where everything is familiar yet strange, a place where I feel I go too often, but never quite enough. This place is the same for everyone, only different.

In Rwanda I was an ant walking over the rough hide of an elephant — this time 20 years ago I had no idea of the scale of what I could see on the ground. Trekking with a column of rebels from the Ugandan frontier south towards Kigali, we came upon the early massacres of Tutsis, hysterical survivors, flames leaping above huts, mortars roaring down misty valleys. But we had seen a lot of this across Africa in the 1990s. We visited a Catholic pastor in his rectory and I suppose at that point I and my Tutsi guides still respected the priesthood and could not imagine their complicity in murder. As we drank tea with him, we failed to ask why he had the body of a woman with her brains bashed out sprawled on the steps of his church. And then it just went on and on.