When Boris Johnson announced his plan to suspend parliament, I was visiting Orkney with my wife, Penny. It was the last week of a month-long stay in Scotland, and it took a day for the news to reach us. We were having tea with some English friends on 29 August when they heard what had happened. They began to fume: [...]

Growing concern about the prescription of drugs that cause dependence has been backed up by a recent report from Public Health England (PHE). The agency discovered that in 2017-18, 13% of adults in England received at least one prescription for opioids such as morphine or oxycodone (although this represented a slight [...]

As sugar was to the 18th and 19th centuries, so chicken is to the 20th and 21st centuries. It has been turned into one of the defining commodities of our era. A luxury until it underwent its industrial revolution from the 1960s on, it is now ubiquitous. Today, questions about how poultry is produced, by and for whom, [...]

A prime minister willing to die in a ditch. A machiavellian adviser snared by his own ambition. Bloodletting and purges. Brothers falling out. An opposition leader trapped by his own [...]

As scientists, we tend to operate under an unspoken assumption – that our job is to provide the world with factual information, and if we do so our leaders will use it to make wise decisions. But what if that assumption is wrong? For decades, conservation scientists like us have been telling the world that species [...]

Being arrested in the Italian port of Lampedusa drew a lot of media attention on me personally this summer as a young woman and a sea captain whose vessel, the Sea-Watch 3, had rescued 40 people from the Mediterranean and taken them to safety. My arrest came after two weeks at sea attempting to secure a political [...]

On 1 September 1939, as the massed German divisions began the invasion of Poland, one of the places that would be quickly overrun was a small and unprepossessing town on a railroad junction close to the Vistula [...]

Imagine we’re building a country. Our hypothetical nation is a society like any other, made up of people – parents, nurses, pensioners and toddlers. It will need infrastructure, laws, services and taxes, and a set of values to guide us on how to arrange each of [...]

The word autism means a lot of different things to different people. To some, it conjures an image of the socially awkward eccentric who, besotted by a narrow set of interests, eschews small-talk and large gatherings in favour of solitude. To others, it’s a profoundly life-limiting disorder that consumes every [...]

I was born in France to Turkish parents. A small flat in a tower block, sunlight through the curtains pierced by swirls of cigarette smoke. The strong smell of Gauloises, Turkish and Syrian tobacco packaged with French style. Immigrants, students, workers … leftists, mostly. Reading Althusser and Fanon but not so [...]