No one likes a blatant boaster. So, as adults, we learn that if we want to boast, we must be subtle about it. The way to show off without being loathed is to drop small details about your life into your conversation and your prose, to signal your taste, education, career achievements and social status.
As a birthday treat, a good father might take his ten-year-old daughter to the ballet or a Disney movie. Three years ago, North Korea’s ruling dictator Kim Jong-un (a.k.a. ‘Brilliant Comrade’) took his ten-year-old daughter Kim Ju-ae to the launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile. It was her first public outing. Subsequent kiddie treats have
From time to time, I’ve given some famous pianists a bit of a kicking in the arts pages of this magazine. You may be a Bach specialist, but that’s no excuse for sleepwalking through all six keyboard partitas in a marathon recital. Your Beethoven Diabelli Variations may be renowned, but don’t expect a rave review
The American-Israeli attacks on Iran were publicly called Epic Fury, but behind the scenes it is Britain’s handling of the war which provoked that reaction – not just from Donald Trump but from the UK’s allies in the Gulf. A Labour peer was in Washington when the first missiles slammed into Tehran on Friday evening
The United States and Israel killed Ayatollah Khamenei, and Xi Jinping’s decade-long project to build an alternative to the American-led order died with him. The view in Beijing has been that the West is declining. Xi built his foreign policy on that premise For years, Beijing quietly assembled a network of dictatorships and client states
When President George W. Bush invaded Mesopotamia in 2003, everybody laughed at Comical Ali, the bespectacled Iraqi information minister who kept insisting that the American ‘rats’ were doomed as Saddam Hussein’s regime collapsed around him. The world moved on. Iran is not Iraq, as President Donald Trump’s supporters are so fond of saying, and Bush-era
I am in Dubai where we are doing our best to keep calm and carry on. Granted, the sudden instruction to ‘seek immediate shelter’ in the early hours of Sunday morning was unnerving, but with the exception of excitable ‘influencers’, few people are cowering in their basements. On Saturday evening, I’d hotfooted it to the
Three years ago, Nottingham University students Grace O’Malley-Kumar and Barnaby Webber, along with caretaker Ian Coates, were murdered by Valdo Calocane in a psychotic rampage. These were preventable deaths. Calocane should have been detained long before he went on his killing spree. The fact that he wasn’t is the consequence of a decade of progressive
One word stood out in the florid and overwrought announcement of the death of Iran’s Supreme Leader by a tearful state-television newsreader on 1 March: ‘Leader and Imam of the Muslims, His Eminence Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Hosseini Khamenei, on the path of upholding the exaltation of the sacred sanctuary of the Islamic Republic of Iran,
Five people I never met wished me a Happy Friday last Friday by email. You can pretty much be wished a happy anything nowadays, except perhaps Easter, since this assumes you share in the joy of the Resurrection. The London lights now say Happy Ramadan. Actually, if I were wished a Happy Lent it’d be
No TV show better encapsulates the nexus between money and power than Industry. The HBO drama sees investment bankers screwing, snorting and slogging their way to the top of English society. Now, in its fourth series, political intrigue is taking centre stage. Think House of Cards – but with more sex and better-remunerated hotties. Mickey
The Epstein files lift the curtain on how power is exercised and influence traded by our financial elite. It is not a cheering sight. Business and economic gurus like the former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers asking for dating advice from a convicted paedophile does not build confidence in the masters of the universe. Distasteful
The crowded market place emerging on Britain’s right is bewildering. Nigel Farage and Reform UK appeared to have successfully colonised the space for positions more robust than those offered by the current Tory party. They have been ahead in the national opinion polls for months now. But the launch of Restore Britain, a new party
Catherine and Heathcliff. These are surely roles that every attractive British actor should aspire to. Why mope between auditions for years if you don’t think it could be your windswept hair decorating bus posters one day? So the British director Emerald Fennell’s casting of two Australians – Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie – to play
My family name has become a byword for scandal. My father Robert went from press baron to tabloid monster within weeks of his death in 1991. My sister Ghislaine, convicted in New York three decades later for sex-trafficking offences linked to Jeffrey Epstein, became the algorithmically optimised villain of the online age. Last week’s arrest
Peros Banhos on the Chagos archipelago looks like your basic tropical island paradise: turquoise waters and golden sands, waves lapping on a palm-fringed beach. But step off the strip of sand into the wall of green behind, and you’re enveloped by mosquitoes. The old well you were counting on for water is a shallow puddle.
The Russians are on the warpath – and Europe is Vladimir Putin’s next target. That was Sir Keir Starmer’s alarming claim at the Munich Security Conference earlier this month. Britons ‘must be ready to fight, to do whatever it takes to protect our people, our values, and our way of life’, Starmer warned. Britain and
For more than 60 years, scientists have been on the stealthiest stakeout in history. Using state-of-the-art listening devices, they’ve tapped into thousands of homes, waiting patiently for their targets to reveal their presence, and ultimately been rewarded with silence. If this covert activity were occurring in our own country, one might have become impatient and
The two main harms of government regulation, to be balanced against any benefits, are cost and delay. But there is another harm, rarer but lethal when it happens. Sometimes regulation perversely increases risk by lulling the regulated business or people into a false sense of safety. I had this thought last weekend as I watched
Given the relative sizes of their economies, one might conclude that Russia would quake before the military might of Europe’s Nato members. Russia, the ninth-largest economy in the world, is up against the third, sixth, seventh and eighth in the shape of Germany, Britain, France and Italy. Yet the reality is that, militarily, it is