The launch of the Sun on Sunday is a perfectly timed riposte to Leveson Beleaguered staff at News International say they have rarely seen Rupert Murdoch so full of energy. Sleeves up, literally and figuratively, the almost 81-year-old newspaperman is back in his element, tearing around the offices at Wapping, doing what he always loves
The contest for the Republican nomination is stuck in the rogues’ gallery stage Fredericksburg, Virginia An election year in America is just that — a year. The 2012 race has just kicked off and still has eight months to go, but it is already having a critical effect on me: keeping up with the contest
…and the divisions are more bitterly felt than ever Until recently, the British middle classes felt quite good about themselves. The class war was over, and they had won it. Pretty much everyone wanted to join the middle classes. If they were not already members, the way things were going they very soon would be.
The doubt that comes to mind in the Highlands when faced with such wonders as Glenfinnan — is this for real? — always arises when recalling the enchanted coastal village Glenelg. ‘Does Glenelg exist?’ seems an almost reasonable thought when away from the place. ‘Did I ever see those colours, that light, the Sound of
In the constant light of summer, Tromsø is an extraordinarily civilised place from which to visit the wilderness, discovers Harry Mount ‘Why do the British look so ill?’ I was asked by a 23-year-old woman at a dinner party in the Arctic Norwegian city of Tromsø. ‘Is it because they have chips for breakfast?’ She
Now is the time to skate Stockholm’s archipelago, says Fraser Nelson There are two times to visit Sweden: the height of summer or the depths of winter. If you have to choose, go now. Diving into the waters of Stockholm’s archipelago is a joy you can more or less imagine: skating across them, and having
The man who promised to reform France looks set to become a martyr to the euro – and his own abrasive personality Paris Nicolas Sarkozy chose an unpropitious week to tell the French public he wanted to be their president for another five years. As Sarko was granting a semi-official interview to Le Figaro, addressing
At Athens airport, the digital noticeboard reads like the script of an agitprop play. ‘Strike, strike, strike, strike, strike,’ it announces, next to the destinations. ‘Due to the turmoil,’ says the PR person we’re talking to, ‘all the politicians you’ve flown in to interview have pulled out.’ My cameraman, driving the Audi, seems determined to
Lord Carey of Clifton isn’t the retiring sort. He stood down as Archbishop of Canterbury ten years ago, but he wasn’t ready to end his days in quiet contemplation. At 76, he is still a public figure — more so, perhaps, than ever. He used to be dismissed as a plodding liberal; a typically ineffectual Anglican
A manifesto for the BBC’s top job Messrs Egon Zehnder, headhunters, are helping the BBC find its next director general. The involvement of these swanky international executive search agents is depressing. Their American-‘flavored’ website brags about helping companies seek ‘competitive advantage’ and identify ‘talented business leaders’. If the BBC is to have a future, it
The aid business has grown fat. It’s time there was proper scrutiny Such a simple question: should Oxfam spend a couple of hundred pounds a month opening up the swimming pool at its guesthouse in one of the nicer parts of Nairobi? It was posed by Duncan Green, the group’s head of research, on his
Do you xxxx? Sorry to be impertinent. Perhaps you simply xx or x? I’m not a natural x’er, but it’s hard to resist when everyone else is x’ing all over the place. Besides, if someone x’s you, it would be rude not to x back, right? Truly, in this age of emotional incontinence, the etiquette
Nassim Taleb is banging a glass against a table to demonstrate his notion of ‘anti-fragility’. ‘This glass is fragile,’ he says. ‘Vulnerable to nasty surprises.’ The glass survives his test. ‘Now, what’s the opposite of fragile? Not “robust”, because robust things don’t respond to any surprise, nasty or pleasant. To survive shocks and be adaptable
No one who knows Sir Mervyn King would describe him as a radical. The Bank of England governor looks every inch the owlish academic, yet he is midway through what is possibly the greatest gamble in Britain’s economic history. Under the frosted-glass term of ‘quantitative easing’, he may soon have the Bank artificially create £600
The Americans have 1776, the French have 1789 and we have 1940. The date is not official for us the way it is for them; it marks no formal founding of a nation or republic. But the events of that year — specifically, Britain’s lonely stand against the Nazi menace — have acquired the status
Is the Syrian regime hellbent on political suicide? There can be no doubt that he is determined to crush any resistance, but if President Bashar al-Assad had really started a massacre in the city of Homs (as was reported by most of the western media) it would have been an act of complete madness. And
When I take the dogs into the garden last thing at night, a dark shape looms up just beyond the garden wall. It is a 12th-century stone building, with a square tower, leaded and stone-tiled roofs, and large plain windows. It looms even larger in my imagination, since I am one of the two churchwardens
Rowan Williams’s would-be successors have begun jostling for position. One stands out Who shall be the next Archbishop of Canterbury, do you suppose? They are jockeying for position at the moment, suffused with godliness and the distinct suspicion that old beardie has had more than enough and may wish to shuffle off to a warm
At next week’s General Synod, the plotters-in-chief will be out in force, but this gossiping and manoeuvring is not just a sign of the archbishop’s demise. Throughout his time in office, Rowan Williams has been isolated and undermined — not by the media, but by his own clergy. The case for him stepping down early
The last politically correct form of prejudice is against football’s working-class supporters There is a brilliant irony to the campaign to ‘kick racism out of football’: its backers — the commentators and FA suits driving this petit-bourgeois push to clean up footie — think in a similar way and use very similar lingo to the