Washington, DC Republican strategists have long complained about how, every election, the Democrats mobilise minority groups against them. Now they’re trying to turn the tables. Right-wing social media warriors, encouraged by @realDonaldTrump, have spent months talking about ‘Blexit’: a black voter exit from the Democratic party. This week, the President and others have begun calling
A pale sun had emerged from wintry clouds and the hillsides were topped snowy white. But all around me was the workaday bustle of Beirut streets still wet from overnight winter rain. This was the Armenian quarter, near the docks, at morning coffee time. I was standing on the Rue Qobaiyat, opposite a downtown petrol
In my 2010 short story ‘Prepositions’, a woman has lost her husband not in 9/11 but on 9/11 — when coming to the aid of a family whose distress had nothing to do with the World Trade Center. Composed as a letter to a friend whose husband did indeed perish in the Twin Towers, the
I was down the pub with my wife last week, out in the tiny smoking section, when a woman with a glass of beer sat down beside us and opened a conversation. She was from Delhi, she told us, before announcing somewhat grandly that she was an ‘academic’. I suppose I should have got the
I had forgotten, until I checked this week, that Mrs May timed the general election of June 2017 in order to have a mandate for the Brexit negotiations. They began ten days after the nation voted. She conveyed no sense, at the time, of how the election result had changed her situation. In her beginning is
The nation certainly needs optimism this week, so what better moment to start building our ‘UK Optimist Fund’ of shares with exciting prospects for the post-Brexit era, for which I invited suggestions last week? I’m grateful to all respondents but was particularly glad to hear from former minister Edwina Currie — whose stock picks show
