On the day I arrive in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan’s capital, it’s almost impossible to see the mountains that loom behind the city because of the smog. By the late morning, they have started to appear. Second-hand cars from around the world jam the four-lane highways that make up the city’s post-Soviet grid. Left-hand-drive cars (the correct
We live in an age of instant communication. But communication has never been less certain. Once in a while, WhatsApp takes several days to deliver a message to me. The first I know that someone contacted me on Friday is when my phone pings on Tuesday. Like when a friend let me know he and
Early one Sunday in 2012 a man fell out of the sky over Sheen, an affluent suburb of south-west London, and landed in the middle of a quiet residential road. ‘I heard a monstrous bang. I thought someone had been hit by a car,’ one resident told a local newspaper. ‘Two fellows going to church
Three months ago I travelled with my wife to Ireland’s west coast for a reunion with our first foster placements, now settled with their new family. The two sisters, then aged five and two, had been removed by police from their home in pyjamas and driven to our house in 2017. I remember trawling around
‘Will someone steal my coat?’ ‘No, you’re on a holy pilgrimage,’ my son’s Irish carer-companion Rosemarie reassured him. We were going to Lourdes, where in 1858 a poor peasant girl, Bernadette Soubirous, had 18 visions of the Virgin Mary. At Stansted I’d lost a tooth. I had a bad knee and an ancient foot injury.
After the implosion of Liz Truss’s premiership, Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak met to discuss which of them should succeed her. Neither wanted to back down to make way for the other. Late one Saturday night, they discussed whether a way could be found that would suit them both. It could not. As they walked
What do you get for the man who has everything? Saudi Arabia’s ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, is said to have a $500 million yacht, a $450 million Leonardo painting and a $300 million French château. Now he’s acquired a new bauble: American golf. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) has negotiated a controlling interest in
Olympic leaders say there’s no such thing as male advantage in sport. Here’s a simple question for them: if that were true, why not just scrap sex-based categories of men and women altogether? We all know why. Men run faster, jump higher and are stronger than women. In my sport of swimming, men are on
‘Does Putin even still exist? Where is he anyway?’ asked Igor Strelkov, former minister of defence of the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic last month in one of the regular video rants he publishes on his Telegram channel. It’s a good question. Since 3 May, the Kremlin has been struck by two Ukrainian drones while up
I have a friend who describes me as an ‘uptight boring old straight heterosexual’ – simply because I don’t use porn or prostitutes, don’t swing both ways and have no interest in orgies and dogging, or any desire to be tied up and flogged by some fat dominatrix in a ‘torture den’ in Pimlico. He
The Portuguese poet José Tolentino Mendonça is a handsome man in his fifties with a shaved head and meticulously trimmed beard. In one photograph he’s wearing an ultramarine blue polo shirt; in another, a lovely beige cashmere sweater that matches his tan. His poems depict emotional pain in cryptic language. In ‘The Last Day of
There is a growing fashion for fake books. Not fake as in written by a series of AI prompts, but fake as in things – cleverly painted empty boxes, or a façade of spines glued to a wall – designed to mislead the casual onlooker into thinking that they are books. A recent New York
Self-pity is one hell of a drug. On Tuesday, a day late, Prince Harry appeared in the High Court to ‘give evidence’ against the Mirror. The only testimony he was willing to provide, however, was his familiar gloop about the pain he suffered growing up rich, famous and royal. He can’t help himself, poor boy,
Since declaring Covid-19 to be ‘over as a global health emergency’ early last month, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has made it very clear that it has no intention of reforming. At its World Health Assembly two weeks ago, North Korea was among ten nations elected to sit on the WHO’s Executive Board, thereby giving
The Calabrian mafia, the ’Ndrangheta, were once something of a side-show compared with the more famous Sicilian mafia. Now they are the largest criminal organisation in Europe. Last month, European police arrested more than 130 ’Ndrangheta members in Italy, Germany, Belgium, Portugal and Spain in a coordinated swoop codenamed ‘Eureka’. Almost all have been charged
This spring, San Diego Zoo’s Wildlife Alliance proudly announced the arrival of Trey, a newborn colt. Trey is a Przewalski’s horse – the last wild horse species on the planet, and one of the least pronounceable (say ‘zhuh-varl-skis’ and you’ll be close). It was another small conservation victory. But Trey is particularly unusual, because this
After weeks of travelling – first Paris, then Kinshasa – I was looking forward to my evening at L’Horloge du Sud in Brussels. Known for its poisson liboké (fish wrapped in banana leaf) and other African specialities, the restaurant is popular with the city’s African diaspora. I’d been invited by a Pan-African thinktank to discuss
Once, museum curators saw their job as collecting, conserving and displaying to the public works of art or humbler objects that were beautiful, interesting and representative of a time and a place. Now many of them want to get rid of, or at least hide away, objects that they pronounce shameful. Cambridge University, under its
What kind of conservative is Rishi Sunak? This time last year, there was a clear answer: he was a fiscal hawk who was worried about how much the government had to borrow to fund the Covid crisis. As chancellor, he was always fighting with the prime minister over high spending. When Sunak tried to raise
Are you happy in your work? In 37 years of journalism I don’t remember once being asked that question by my bosses. Nor did I expect to be. But in the civil service there is a bureaucratic machine to make sure employees are asked once a year if everything is all right, dearie. At unpublicised