Joseph Wright of Derby’s painting An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768) is not really an experiment on a bird—it’s an experiment on the people watching. How, it asks, will spectators react to ...

One thing about war crimes and other offences against international law is that they should survive the news cycle. Such events should remain important after the news reports have come and gone. They ...

It was around 1980 that Paul Marshall, a keen Christian undergraduate at Oxford, went to a presentation by the evangelical aid agency Tearfund. He was so impressed by the call for Christians to help ...

“And you, Mr President, are no Franklin D Roosevelt.” The words must have briefly hovered in Keir Starmer’s mind when he learned that Donald J Trump had been telling reporters “this is not Winston ...

On the face of it the welcome decision of the Supreme Court of the United States to strike down President Donald Trump’s tariff policy was unremarkable. Of all the many constitutional trespasses of ...

If you are reading this before you have reached the top of the greasy pole—good. Successful prime ministers depend on the preparations they make before they arrive at Number 10, not just the decisions ...

This week on Media Confidential, Alan and Lionel are joined by Ailbhe Rea, political editor at the New Statesman, and George Parker, political editor of the Financial Times, for an insider’s account ...

In the darkness of the Indian cinema, reality falls away. Enter a world in which beautiful heroines sing in chiffon saris on alpine landscapes without getting cold. In which floppy-haired heroes ...

Slowly, from freshly shovelled graves, they wake, arms stretched out, eyes rolled back. How could this be? Had they not been killed? And yet on they march, forming new thinktanks, writing scathing ...