Russia

Mark Steyn once wrote of the United Nations: ‘It’s a good basic axiom that if you take a quart of ice-cream and a quart of dog feces and mix ’em together the result will taste more like the latter than the former. That’s the problem with the U.N.’ It’s a maxim that works double for Fifa, world football’s governing body, which has just cleared future World Cup hosts Qatar and Russia of any wrongdoing but managed to criticise the FA. The BBC reports: ‘As for Russia, they have also been cleared, although the report noted its bid team made “only a limited amount of documents available for review”. ‘According to

From The Spectator, 24 October 1914: For years past the vodka monopoly in Russia has been a public scandal. Government officials, in order to get good financial returns, have connived at the abasement of the people by encouraging drink. Year by year the revenue from the vodka monopoly has increased by leaps and bounds till the present year, when it was estimated to yield £93,000,000, or very nearly a third of the total revenue of the Russian Empire. Critics of Russia have long lugubriously prophesied that, in spite of all the Tsar’s protestations in favour of temper. ance, he would never venture to take any step which would impair such

After months of escalating tensions over Ukraine and talk of a new cold war, Russia and the West could soon reach a surprising rapprochement. The eurozone economy is suffering badly and sanctions against Russia are partly to blame. Winter is also upon us, and that reminds every-one Vladimir Putin still holds the cards when it comes to supplying gas. The clincher, though, is that Ukraine is heading towards financial meltdown. Unless an extremely large bailout is delivered soon, there will be a default, sending shockwaves through the global economy. That’s a risk nobody wants to take — least of all Washington, London or Berlin. Sanctions against Russia were always going to

Hello. I recognize some of you. We’ve bumped against each other in Sadler’s Wells or Covent Garden or the Birmingham Hippodrome. I look forward to meeting you below the line sometime. This is the second time I’ve returned to reviewing dance after a break. I’ve spent the past year doing a Russian MA to further a book I’m working on, and not going to much dance at all. But here I am again. Why do I keep coming back to dance? I’m a musician rather than a dance person, really, and there are very few musically alert and visually intelligent choreographers around, capable of adding dance to music and coming

Václav Klaus has made a habit of saying things others shy away from saying, but it doesn’t seem to have done him much harm in the popularity stakes. Quite the opposite: the 73-year-old ardently Eurosceptic free-marketeer has legitimate claims to be regarded as the most successful ‘true blue’ conservative politician in Europe over the past 25 years. He was, after all, prime minister of the Czech Republic from 1992 to 1998 and then his country’s president for a further ten years, from 2003 to 2013. So when we meet after a typically hearty Serbian lunch — at the International Science and Public Conference in Belgrade — I am keen to