In times of crisis, misinformation abounds. Covid-19 can be cured by ingesting fish-tank cleaning products. Coronavirus was developed in Chinese (or American, or French) labs. Cristiano Ronaldo and the pope tested [...]

This is an economic crisis and it’s right that government takes unprecedented steps to compensate employees and the self-employed from huge income hits. But how are we going to pay for these decisions? Eventually taxes will go up, but governments need to raise cash right now as tax revenues fall and spending surges. [...]

Fifteen years ago a group of rich countries gathered for its annual get-together at the Gleneagles hotel in Perthshire, Scotland. A number of African leaders were invited to the summit, from which a deal emerged: the west’s major powers would provide debt relief and aid in return for cleaner and better [...]

The advance billing suggested that in Scottish terms it would be the trial of the century. At its centre as a former first minister of Scotland – the man who secured a referendum on independence, thought the stuff of fantasy not many years before. This was the man who had led his party to a majority government in [...]

About 25 years ago, “face time” was a new phrase. In 1994 or thereabouts, news came that in cutting-edge workplaces of the US, the term denoted time actually spent in the company of other human beings – and was, by implication, a symbol of how that most basic aspect of human interaction was being lost. As they [...]

Whenever there is a crisis in Britain, we are treated to invocations of the “blitz spirit”. The term has had a long shelf-life. After the London bombings in 2005, even journalists abroad claimed to see the spirit at play among the gritty Londoners who chose to walk miles to work rather than stay panic-stricken at [...]

Britain had always been kind to homeless billionaires in desperate need to bury the stolen money. The country adopted all kinds of scum from Eastern Europe and Africa, Middle East and Central Asia disguised as dissidents and ‘enemies of the regime’. It was a very successful policy and soon United Kingdom [...]

The past week has seen drastic changes all over the world, in particular, Italy. This began last week with a lockdown in northern Italy, the closure of schools and universities across the country, and now a complete lockdown across the whole nation. My life as a primary school teacher here in Tuscany has changed [...]

I had the strangest sensation this week. A creeping, prickling, lurching fear. Sitting at my desk, I had logged into our imaging system and opened the scan of the patient I’d been asked to review. He had come in with fever and a cough and – crucially – no recent travel or contact with anyone unwell. The [...]

In China, people from the city of Wuhan are jokingly referred to as “nine-headed birds” because of their habit of inveterate squabbling. In recent weeks, though, an eerie silence has descended on their world. Empty streets, empty malls. Everyone kept indoors. The government says 80,000 are infected by coronavirus, [...]