A decade ago, a fruit-seller in Tunisia set himself alight, and before long dictators were falling like dominoes. Only in the place where it all began has a new democracy endured—but so have many of the problems it was meant…

As many Britons go hungry, burgeoning food banks are answering the need. But are they also giving the government an excuse for tolerating poverty?

A quotation commonly attributed to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry says “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood... but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." Nature writers should…

The pandemic may have increased the demand for cemeteries, but it has also re-established their rightful role as theatres of life, as well as mourning

The Brexit economy was meant to break free from the continent, but the force of events is fast pushing its ruling philosophy in precisely the opposite direction

The great liberal promise is that power must always be held to account. Agreed political rules and formal institutions are the means to honour it. But they are under assault by a populist right—and a misguided left

Obama's instinctive patriotism shines through in the first volume of his memoirs

Corporate diversity programmes are rising—and have become a flashpoint in the culture wars. But are they working?

Why painting today’s tyrants as 20th-century totalitarians lets them off the hook

It has been the most powerful department on Whitehall for a century, coming back stronger from every crisis. But, argues the former editor of the Financial Times, in the age of populism and Covid-19, the writ of 1 Horse Guards…

My task for 2020 was to help choose the best novel in English—and retain my sanity

When artificial intelligence began beating the world’s greatest players, a chess grandmaster devised his own way to give human ingenuity an upper hand against the machine. The result, however, was not quite what he expected