Bomb shelters have come a long way since the Blitz. As missiles from Azerbaijan rained down on Nagorno-Karabakh a few weeks ago, Hayk Harutyunyan and his family took refuge in a basement with wifi, an ensuite toilet and a makeshift mini-bar. There were 12 people crammed in there every night, he told me, ‘but we
In Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy has a running skit about the alehouse in his heroine’s home village where her father, and quite often mother too, disappear for hours at a time. People aren’t allowed to drink on the premises, so are strictly limited to ‘a little board about six inches wide and two
Donald Trump is now showing exactly why he had to be defeated. Well after the votes have been counted, with no evidence of anything but the usual minor glitches — none of which is sufficient to dent Joe Biden’s margin of victory — the President of the United States is doing what he did for
After a difficult nine months, we are naturally all sick of lockdowns and other Covid restrictions. Everyone misses parts of their pre-coronavirus lives, from seeing friends and family, to pubs and restaurants, to the theatre and concerts and, yes, even our workplaces. It was therefore no surprise that this week’s news of a vaccine breakthrough
A few years ago, in a Lords debate on the treatment of Christians in the Middle East, the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks reminded his peers of some famous words of Martin Luther King: ‘In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends.’ That reflection may now
In all the excitement about the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine, it was easy to miss news of the other great hope for getting our lives back to some form of normal. Vaccines are not expected to have much impact for most of us this winter and it will be several years before they suppress Covid-19
It’s all over, bar the litigation. Without some mind-blowing legal reversal in the coming days, Joe Biden will be the 46th president of the United States of America. Donald Trump must be extracted from the White House in the coming weeks, though if he is unwilling to leave nobody is quite sure how he’ll be
Russia is using a ‘drumbeat of disinformation’ to attack the American political system. That was the stark conclusion of the FBI director Christopher Wray in his testimony to the House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee in September. One aim, he said, was to undermine Joe Biden’s campaign. But the main thrust of the attack —
Is it ethical to lock us down again? This is not a facetious question. Over the past eight months, we have heard a great deal about the policies used to manage the virus, but very little about the ethics. This is a mistake. We should be asking how we can critically and reasonably strike a
Montpellier France is under attack. Two weeks ago, Samuel Paty, a middle school teacher, was decapitated in a leafy suburb of Paris after showing his students cartoons of the prophet Mohammed published by Charlie Hebdo in 2015. Last week, there were three killings at the Basilica of Notre-Dame in Nice, and after that, an Orthodox
It has become normal to think of the Islamist attacks in Europe as attacks on a secular way of life. The beheading of the teacher in Paris, the murders in Notre-Dame in Nice and the shootings in Vienna are presented as a struggle between radical Islamism and a particular kind of enlightened secularism born of
When lockdown starts, all kinds of things stop. The first one, in March, was the worst time of my life as a parent, not because of my daughter’s severe disabilities, but because of the lack of support. Elvi is 19. She has a mental age of three, sleeps four hours a night and can’t walk.
There used to be a joke, repeated by English tourists in deserted piazzas, that the Italian for church (chiesa) and for closed (chiusa) were almost the same. Whatever the orari on the door, you were always several hours out. And so you would consult your guidebook, admire in miniature the Ghirlandaio, the Lippi, the really
Why is it so insanely difficult to buy a car? And especially if you are a woman? Part of the trouble is that car salesmen are a particularly unreconstructed breed of men who think ‘lady’ customers will be more interested in the size of the vanity mirror than the fuel consumption. But it’s not just
Six years ago, at the celebratory opening match of the new Basaksehir Stadium in Istanbul, an unlikely football star emerged. The red team’s ageing, six-foot tall centre-forward lumbered toward the white team’s goal; a delicate chip over the advancing keeper brought a goal that sent the stadium into ecstasy. The scorer was Prime Minister Recep
When I met Michael Cohen in New York two years ago, he was a man visibly crushed by what life had done to him. His whole face sagged: he could have defined the word ‘hangdog’, a beagle caught peeing on the Persian rug. We stood outside his apartment building, which was Trump Park Avenue, Trump’s
Not much makes sense during a pandemic but in recent weeks the Covid puzzle has become a deeper mystery. When local lockdowns failed, the solution was to try even more of them. Manchester was put into Tier 3 restrictions when its Covid cases were falling; now there’s talk of a Tier 4. Confirmed infections are nowhere
Imagine a country where you’re allowed to buy vodka and cigarettes but not baby clothes, because they are ‘non-essential’. A place where supermarkets can sell you socks but, mysteriously, neither tights nor lightbulbs. All right, you may plunge to your death down a dimly lit staircase in Pontarddulais, but at least you didn’t get that
Cinema is fading. Borat went straight to Amazon Prime, where he is smaller, and Bond 25 — no time to die eh? — is delayed until next year. In response Cineworld has ‘temporarily’ closed its cinemas and the smaller film houses are struggling. Millennials and Generation Z don’t mind, but I am no such creature:
Churchill was the first British prime minister to appoint a scientific adviser, as early as the 1940s. He had regular meetings with scientists such as Bernard Lovell, the father of radioastronomy, and loved talking with them. He promoted, with public funds research, telescopes and the laboratories where some of the most significant developments of the
