The Week

Leading article

Why Britain is falling behind in the global universities race

Our country still excels when it comes to higher education. Britain has seven of the world’s top 50 universities. In spite of many claims that Brexit would lead to a reduction in the number of foreign students, the intake has never been higher. In 2021-22, there were 680,000 overseas students in higher education in Britain,

Portrait of the week

Diary

Turkey is at an existential crossroads

The wonderful Barbara Kingsolver wrote that hope is something you should not admire from a distance, but rather live inside of, ‘under its roof’. Last week I lived under the roof of hope as the campaigns for the first round of the Turkish presidential elections drew to a close. This is an existential crossroads for

Ancient and modern

How the ancients handled old age

Research in the USA has shown that it is possible to do something about grey hair. But ‘grey hair’ stands for ‘old age’, and there is nothing we can do about that, except make it easier to live with. Modern medicine certainly helps. There was no such luck in the ancient world, where the playwright Sophocles

Barometer

Who else has come after Percy Pig’s crown?

Pig out Marks & Spencer wrote to an ice cream parlour in Hertfordshire demanding that it stop calling one of its products ‘Perky Pig’ on the grounds that it infringed the chain’s copyright of Percy Pigs, which it has been selling since 1992. Some more onomatopoeic porcines: – Pierre Pig: collectible plastic figurines introduced by

Letters

Letters: What Millennial Millie needs

Lion of London Bridge Sir: Douglas Murray’s well-presented essay (‘Don’t be a hero’, 13 May) brings to mind the bravery of the Millwall fan Roy Larner, who fought off three knife-wielding religious fanatics in a terror attack, saving the lives of many others in the process. Stabbed eight times and in a critical condition, the