World

 Washington DC Trump is a fighter – he seems to thrive on pressure – and he is lawyering up The panhandlers outside the White House hold signs saying: ‘Trump is President — saving to leave the country.’ Those signs will have to be updated if Trump’s enemies are right and the 45th President is driven from office by a scandal called ‘Putingate’. Inside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Trump is said to be in a fury about the allegations that he is Russia’s pawn. Washington is gripped by rumours of a president sitting up in bed at night, a cheeseburger balanced on his stomach, raging at the television news. He does not,

If there’s one country that knows how Britain feels in the wake of last week’s suicide bombing in Manchester, it’s France. Similar horror has been visited on the French several times in the past five years with nearly 250 slaughtered at the hands of Islamic extremists, so the French are all too familiar with the grief, the rage and the shock still being felt across the Channel. But not Britain’s incomprehension. At first, maybe, when Mohammed Merah shot dead three Jewish schoolchildren in a Toulouse playground five years ago, but since the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists were slaughtered in January 2015 the French have understood what is going on. The Islamists are

No-one has ever accused Nicola Sturgeon of winging it. Unlike some politicians, she enjoys doing her homework. If you want to talk about the detail of policy, about the technical parameters within which this or that is measured, about the baseline assumptions that dictate funding decisions or the procedural manner in which policy is formulated, then she’s your lady. That much was evident in her election interview with Andrew Neil this evening. I imagine long sections of it were baffling to viewers outwith Scotland as the first minister and Mr Neil traded statistics on the economy, health and, especially, education. Sturgeon has asked to be judged on her record and

For those who argue that Britain should blindly accept refugees, the family history of Salman Abedi must make somewhat uncomfortable reading. Salman was born in Britain in 1994 to a couple who had newly arrived as refugees from Libya. At the time, such people were welcomed with open arms because they were opponents of President Gaddafi, whose embassy staff had killed PC Yvonne Fletcher in London in 1984, who was suspected of commissioning the Lockerbie bomb and who was generally considered to be one of the world’s most evil dictators. On the principle of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”, rather little seems to have been asked of Gaddafi’s opponents.

Donald Trump’s verdict on his audience with Pope Francis – ‘fantastic meeting’, ‘honor of a lifetime’ – may disappoint those who were expecting a showdown. The Pope is supposed to be Trump’s ‘antithesis’, ‘the anti-Trump’, his ‘polar opposite’ and so on and so on. But in the end the meeting was merely awkward, to judge by the photos, and the discussion was mostly confined to safe issues (life, peace and liberty good, persecution of Christians bad). People are making much of the grumpiest Pope photo, but Francis often looks bored and uneasy when he meets important dignitaries. He tends to cheer up around the poor and the sick.  If the

Until last night Ariana Grande’s fans, predominantly tweens and teens, were more preoccupied with the concept of friendship than the ripple effect of international politics. I witnessed this first hand when I was working at MTV and oversaw a Twitter Q&A with Grande, where she spent an hour or so answering questions sent in by fans. As Grande and I scrolled through the 90,000 tweets, I couldn’t help but marvel at how many were on the topic of friendship. ‘What do you look for in a friend?’ they clamoured to know. ‘Who’s your best friend?’ ‘Will you be my friend?’ Today, ‘Arianators’, as her fanbase call themselves, are tragically united in grief

In 1981, when President Reagan lifted the grain embargo on the Soviet Union, Washington Post columnist George F. Will went on to complain that the Reagan administration ‘loved commerce more than it loathed communism’. Well, yes. American conservatives have, more often than not, put commercial interests before ideological ones. Sometimes the two even coincide. For all his bluster about the dangers of Islam, Donald Trump seemed to have a dandy time in Saudi Arabia these past few days before he jetted on to Israel. The $110 billion arms deal that he signed with the Saudis, coupled with their promise to invest in Blackstone Group to boost American infrastructure projects, offers the

On the heels of the Today programme’s invitation to discuss ‘cultural appropriation’ (again), the New York Times reported the disheartening fate of a Canadian magazine editor, Hal Niedzviecki. ‘Anyone, anywhere, should be encouraged to imagine other peoples, other cultures, other identities,’ he wrote, gamely proposing an Appropriation Prize for the ‘best book by an author who writes about people who aren’t even remotely like her or him.’ After the usual social media shitstorm, Niedzviecki had to resign. The Times correctly quoted me asserting that this cockamamie concept threatens ‘our right to write fiction at all’. You can’t claim exclusive title to a culture as to real estate, territorial incursions into

This is an extract from Lionel Shriver’s diary, available in the new issue of the magazine, which is out tomorrow. Over dinner, my fellow Professional American Sarah Churchwell and I shared our dismay over what on earth to say about Trump in public. (Sarah Churchwell ever being at a loss for words will astonish her fans.) Days earlier, a punter had closed my festival event in Swindon with an ostensibly ‘simple’ question: ‘How do you explain Trump?’ Sarah posited a theory gaining mainstream currency. Many of Trump’s characteristics point toward dementia: forgetfulness (leaving an executive order photo-op without remembering to sign the order); volatility, irritability, impulsivity and paranoia; anxiety about stairs