Four years into a seemingly never-ending financial crisis, it is worth considering the deep roots of this calamity. In her 2011 Pulitzer prize-winning novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer...

Cleaning up the physical mess of the horrendous riots of last week may take months. Clearing up the mess caused by broken trust and shattered societal bonds in already deprived communities will take...

Who was the one MP to attack the record of the police unequivocally during last week's debates? "From the bungled arrest of the ricin plotters to the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, the...

The current government has had a stormy relationship with social media. As leader of the opposition, David Cameron caused a stir with his quip that “too many tweets might make a twat.” But one...

On Monday night, as London became a battleground, there was a subtle change in my street. The house opposite mine is occupied by a Caribbean family, with teenage and twenty-something children. On...

I've lost count of the number of column inches outlining a new low in relations between David Cameron and his long-time rival Boris Johnson. Every few months, Johnson says or writes something at odds...

I am having trouble expelling the Norwegian terrorist, Anders Behring Breivik, from my mind. Ever since it emerged that Islamist extremism was not the bogeyman behind Norway’s day of murder, it has...

I tried to buy the Daily Mail this morning, because a friend had written something about the classes he runs in Peckham to encourage black kids to aim higher at school. I could not find one in the...

You don't have to be a genius to see where this one is heading: a summer silly season of media and internet campaigning ends in a Commons vote on capital punishment, which, after the Liberal...

The News International imbroglio has been the biggest scandal to hit these islands since the collapse of the British banking sector in 2008. Common to the two crises has been the role of government:...