The post-Maastricht EU has its priorities wrong. Monetary union is more likely to divide than unite. Timothy Garton Ash bets on it not going ahead and proposes that Britain should launch a "second...

Stories of untreatable new diseases, from Aids to Ebola to Creutzfeldt-Jakob, fill the headlines. Might they foretell epidemics on the scale of the Black Death, and even the end of the human race? Or...

John Kay, Britain's leading "stakeholder" economist, separates the virtues of market economics from the vices of aggressive individualism. He argues that individualistic market economies are less...

The late Ernest Gellner, a life-long anti-communist, deplored the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Here he explains his regrets-for those in the east who have had their moral universe shattered,...

Absolutely off the record Dear Peter, I feel rather naughty writing to you. A taboo is being broken. Everyone knows that there is an "us" and "them" and you are definitely not one of "us." By which I...

The assertion of national identities within the United Kingdom has left Britain in an identity muddle. Englishness, stripped of Britishness, has acquired illiberal connotations. But Neal Ascherson...

Apartheid is over but the battle to control South Africa's institutions is just beginning. Sophie Pedder reports on the succession crisis dividing the liberal English-speaking University of the...

Will virtual reality spell the end of the literary imagination? George Steiner argues that new technologies will destroy the point of the novel-its permanence. This is no tragedy. Talent has already...

In China's age of economic liberalisation, the new Shanghai is being ordered to get rich again - on condition that artists and writers, who gave the old Shanghai its free spirit, stay mute. Ian...

Beppe Severgnini talks to Walter Veltroni, the man who wants to turn Italy's ex-communist party into an American-style democraticc party