World

Poor Mr Bergstresser. He put up the money to start the financial reporting company but his name wasn’t as snappy as those of his two partners, so ‘Dow Jones’ it was. At least he got the rewards, though, unlike Mr Taylor: the grocer sold out to Mr Waite and Mr Rose after just a couple of years, hence Waitrose. Other ‘people’ never existed in the first place. Faber & Faber was started by Geoffrey Faber on his own: he added the second name to sound more respectable. And there was no Mr Aston — Lionel Martin raced his cars at Aston Clinton in Buckinghamshire. His wife realised that the combination

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

To clear up any confusion, American SATs are closer to A-levels than to British primary-school SATs. In my day, this hours-long test of maths and language mastery in the final year of high school was a bullet-sweating business. That score would dictate which colleges we could get into, and we took the results to heart as proof of how smart we were (or not). The exam’s aim, as I understood it, was to objectively assess intellectual aptitude on your basic level playing field. We all took the same test in the same amount of time, regardless of our backgrounds, to earn numerical scores that were comparable across the cohort. Yet

Looking back on Narendra Modi’s first five years in office as India’s Prime Minister, it’s hard to find good news. Record-high joblessness, a stagnating economy, and continued widespread government corruption. With any other person, this would spell electoral defeat, but not for Modi. This week, the 68 year-old leader of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) swept to power for a second term, outperforming his results in 2014 that led him to power and picking up more than 300 seats in the Indian Parliament. His first victory had been a complete shock. For an almost uninterrupted 60 years, the Congress Party had controlled India and its parliament with a

You won’t find a more committed and passionate opponent of president Donald Trump in Washington, D.C. than Nancy Pelosi (witness yesterday’s blowup at the White House, in which the president walked out of a meeting on infrastructure over Pelosi’s earlier comments about a Trump-ordered coverup).   The two-time Speaker of the House and long-time politician from liberal San Francisco is the opposite of the president in many ways. Whereas Trump takes pride in being the bull in the china shop, Pelosi is a highly-calculating politician who thinks long and hard before she settles on a course of action.   Trump is a nationalist (some would say quasi-nativist) at heart; Pelosi,

President Donald Trump likes to talk. He’s a typical New York blowhard in many ways—obnoxious, loud, self-confident (probably too confident), and not very self-aware. His favourite topic of discussion is the 2016 presidential election and how he shocked the planet by pulling perhaps the biggest upset in modern American political history.   That victory, however, rested on thin reeds. Trump actually received more than 2.5 million fewer votes than Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, yet won the election thanks to the Electoral College. He was victorious in all the right places, breaking through the Democratic party’s so-called blue-wall in the Midwest by turning out his rural base and winning over traditional, blue-collar voters

‘I have always believed in miracles,’ Scott Morrison beamed. Australia’s first Pentecostal prime minister was addressing a victory rally after an upset in Saturday’s federal election. Throughout the campaign, pollsters and pundits had been as one: the Coalition (a centre-right alliance between Morrison’s Liberal Party and the agrarian National Party) was finished and Labor was headed into government after six years in opposition. Morrison was the fractious Coalition’s third prime minister since 2013, his ministry was divided over climate change and Labor leader Bill Shorten had tapped into public anger at the banks and the top end of town. Then they voted. One by one, marginal Coalition seats held firm and

The mass sexual assaults around Cologne’s main railway station on New Year’s Eve 2015 rocked Germany, not just because of their scale (police believe hundreds of men were involved) but because of the sense that news of the attacks was being suppressed, and its links to the migrant crisis then at its peak, denied. In response to public anger, Chancellor Angela Merkel was moved to promise that the crimes would be met with a ‘hard response from the state’. Three years on, what has happened to that response? In terms of resources, German authorities have delivered on Merkel’s promise. It has been followed by one of the most extensive criminal investigations

Conrad Black, who was jailed in the US for fraud and obstructing justice, has been pardoned by Donald Trump. Here Peter Oborne profiles the former media mogul and his wife Barbara in an article published in The Spectator in 2004: A few weeks ago executives were endeavouring to bring home to Conrad Black the full horror of his personal and corporate predicament, when a sight met their eyes. His wife Barbara, clad only in a leotard and shades, had swept into the room. For a moment nobody spoke. ‘Oh Conrad,’ Barbara Black proclaimed: ‘Let’s just get out of here. They hate us.’ Barbara Amiel was born in Watford, and she enjoyed