World

In this week’s books podcast we’re talking about why the Father of English Poetry, Geoffrey Chaucer, at least half belongs in a French, Latin and Italian tradition. Marion Turner’s magnificently scholarly Chaucer: A European Life sets the great writer in his own times — one of a hinge between feudal and early modern ideas about selfhood, authorship and originality; and one in which our man travelled widely and with profit across the Europe of his day, learning from poets in France and Hainaut, from Dante and Boccaccio, and even possibly from the painter Giotto. Plus, she tells how the man we often think of as a merry, roly-poly little character on

Even on a day like this, a wet Tuesday in June, you would expect the British left to find a few thousand protesters to issue screaming denunciations of Donald Trump. So it was, and here they were: Quaker socialists and union activists, avengers for Palestine and gay priders, euro-federalists, vegans, concerned mothers, NHS idolaters and 13 people dressed as chickens. They marched out of Trafalgar Square and down Whitehall. Nobody rubs them up the wrong way quite like Trump does. When President Xi Jinping, the closest personage the 21st century has produced to an actual dictator, made an official state visit to the UK in 2015 the marble streets of

The last time president Donald Trump flew to London, pandemonium ensued. A visit that was supposed to be ordinary turned out to be extraordinary. Thousands of Londoners protested the president’s arrival, launching a big baby Trump balloon into the air (which predictably captured the thin-skinned president’s attention). Trump took to the pages of the Sun and trashed Theresa May’s negotiating ability, explaining that the PM didn’t listen to his advice on how to get the best Brexit terms for the UK. To top it all off, Trump went on to laud Boris Johnson as someone who would “make a great prime minister”—a remark that came at a particularly acrimonious time in May’s tenure with

Hong Kong’s freedoms, autonomy and rule of law face ever-increasing threats, but there is a twin set of legal dangers that pose the most serious risks for the city’s way of life: an old colonial law that needs reform, and a new law that should never be introduced. Last week, two Hong Kong activists, Ray Wong and Alan Li, announced that Germany had granted them political asylum – the first ever asylum seekers from Hong Kong. For a city that has for decades been a destination for refugees fleeing mainland China, Vietnam, Pakistan and other parts of the world to be producing its own asylum seekers is a sign of

Trump and Boris; Boris and Trump – the two men have a lot more in common than funny hair, an appetite for women, and a magical ability to offend left-liberal sensibilities. But the hot question in Westminster at the moment is whether these two big beasts will meet when the American President visits London next week. Will they? Won’t they? The British press is teeming with reports that Trump and Boris are to meet privately, possibly at a meeting mediated by Nigel Farage. The new Special Relationship, populism-style. Mr Steerpike understands that, on the American side, officials are standing by to organise the meeting, but it hasn’t been formalised. Boris’s

The day after Britain voted to leave the European Union, Donald Trump arrived by helicopter at Turnberry, his golf course in Scotland. The financial markets were in crisis and David Cameron had resigned in a panic. The Dutch Prime Minister, Mark Rutte, said that Britain had ‘collapsed: politically, monetarily, constitutionally and economically’. The then candidate (still not even party nominee) Trump put it differently. ‘You just have to embrace it,’ he said. ‘It’s the will of the people. I love to see people take their countries back.’ Perhaps his advice should have been taken more seriously. Huge numbers of people, including many Americans, think that Trump is unfit for the

Whenever I see pictures of Donald Trump and Shinzo Abe together I hear the theme music from the Neil Simon comedy The Odd Couple. For Trump and Abe are indeed the Felix and Oscar of global politics, a gently comic double act with starkly different but oddly complimentary personalities and all the appearance of a twilight years bromance. The pair met soon after Trump’s inauguration when Abe rushed stateside to be the first foreign leader to pay his respects to the new president. Since then the relationship has blossomed, and they’ve met frequently, and conversed on some 40 separate occasions. There have been some choice comic moments along the way.

If there’s one politician in Europe as triumphant as Nigel Farage right now it’s Emmanuel Macron. The European election results were not, as many outside France have declared, a humiliation for the French president. On the contrary, they were a success. Publicly the Elysée described the result as “honourable”, but in private the president was reportedly cock-a-hoop. “Basically, we’ve won, it’s a triumph and Macron is jubilant,” said one of his staff. While his LREM party may have trailed Marine Le Pen’s NR by a narrow margin (23.3 per cent to 22.4), Macron’s eyes were on another opponent. Seven years ago the centre-right Les Republicains [LR] were the ruling party in