It’s a tone of voice. All disabled people recognise it. People. Speak. Slowly. And. Say. My name. A lot. (In case I have forgotten it.) They are also upbeat! Indeed, overwhelmingly and gratingly positive! It’s the same tone used for what are deemed to be confused older people, and I hate it – because I am [...]

Do you remember when the weather was a reliable source of innocuous small talk? “Hot today, isn’t it?” you would observe to a colleague as you stood awkwardly in the lift together. They would reply with something about the garden needing rain, then you would go back to ignoring each other. Talking about the [...]

Twenty-one years ago, on my recommendation, the UN general assembly named 2001 the year of “dialogue among civilisations”, and signalled its commitment to peace and its rejection of war and violence. The Iranian people, despite their own historic grievances and troubled history, opened a hopeful new chapter of [...]

Today, 5 July, marks 10 years since the far western Chinese region of Xinjiang exploded into violence between Uighurs, a majority-Muslim group living there, and Han, China’s dominant ethnic group. The incident left at least 196 dead, countless injured, and a government determined to push the Uighurs to the [...]

Seven years ago I watched Tony Nicklinson weep after he lost his high court bid to challenge the law on assisted dying. Almost immediately after the verdict, he began to starve himself, and after six days of refusing food and water, he died from [...]

It was Sunday 1 November 2020. The helicopter carrying his hush-hush VIP visitor was expected soon. Staring through the Chequers windows at the lawn where the unmarked Sea King would soon land, prime minister Boris Johnson could hardly believe what he was about to [...]

Is there gaslighting on Love Island? Maybe. From cruel jokes to crueller recouplings, commentators have been quick – and sometimes astute – to notice how patterns of behaviour on the programme can dramatise the more disturbing aspects of dating in the real world. These are interesting conversations and, as others [...]

So the European Union, finally, has managed to nominate people to fill its top jobs. The era of Jean-Claude Juncker and Donald Tusk is over. And – of course – the announcements are being interpreted in this country through a Brexit-tinted [...]

By accident or design, the eruption of political violence in Hong Kong has opened the way for direct rule from Beijing. It is unlikely radical new measures to bring Britain’s former colony to heel will be imposed overnight. But furious official statements in response to Monday’s unprecedented clashes suggest the [...]

So the robots are coming for our jobs, are they? Yawn. That’s such an old story. Goes back to Elizabeth I and the stocking frame, if my memory serves me right. Machines have been taking our jobs forever. But economists, despite their reputation as practitioners of the “dismal science”, have always been upbeat [...]