What we see is not the economy. What we see is the tiny fragment of economic life we are supposed to see: the products and services we buy. The rest – the mines, plantations, factories and dumps required to deliver and remove them – are kept as far from our minds as possible. Given the scale of global extraction [...]

Mark Francois has made himself into the most famous ex-TA lieutenant since Gareth Keenan in The Office by insisting on tearing up a letter he happened to have on him when the BBC was trying to ask him about something else. The letter came from the chief executive of a vast and successful company, formed in 1967 as a [...]

How does an 11-year-old boy end up alone in a London police cell? Eleven years old, for heaven’s sake. That means either still in primary school, or at best in the nervous beginnings of secondary. Eleven still says muddy knees, flapping around in a blazer several sizes too big, and wanting a bedtime story – or at [...]

On a grey autumn evening in London just over a year ago, I went out for drinks with a friend to celebrate a new job. Eight hours later I was raped by somebody I’d never met [...]

The curse on the crew of the Flying Dutchman damned them to sail the seas for eternity with no hope of ever reaching port. It came to mind during the dark tempests in which parliament first dismasted the government by rejecting its Brexit deal and then voted to leave that same government afloat. In the hope of [...]

The death of Paweł Adamowicz, the popular liberal mayor of Gdańsk, has sent shockwaves across Poland and elsewhere in [...]

It’s another day, and that means another slice of absurdity served up in Trump’s America, guys! Or in this particular case, slices of pizza. And some hamburgers and other assortments of fast [...]

He drew portraits for Italian dukes, sketched for the papacy and died at the court of a French king. If there is any artist who defies nationhood it is surely Leonardo da Vinci. Yet last week, Leonardo’s cosmopolitan legacy was caught up in an extraordinary intergovernmental spat when Rome renewed its threat to [...]

Have you ever thought much about the bones that remain littered in front of you after finishing a plate of chicken wings? New research suggests that Gallus gallus domesticus – the modern factory farmed chicken – might not be just a Sunday lunch staple but instead a marker of a new age in Earth’s [...]

A century ago the eminent Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore returned his knighthood to the viceroy of India. The “time has come when badges of honour make our shame glaring in their incongruous context of humiliation”, Tagore wrote in outrage as scores of peaceful protesters were massacred in Jallianwala Bagh. He [...]