Violence

To study international politics since the turn of the century has been, in large part, to study the changing nature of autocracy – and the West’s relationship to it. We kicked things off by trying to realise the Trotskyite dream of ushering in global democracy through the barrel of a gun. We wanted to bring an end to the world’s tyrants – or the ones of relevance to us at any rate. We got Iraq. But if we failed to end tyrants, we played our part in helping to mould them. As Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman observe in their intelligent, important book Spin Dictators, throughout this time something far

When it comes to education, I’m in two minds, maybe three. I was sent to private schools, including, for my ‘Oxbridge’ term, Eton, where the teaching was life-changing. But when it came to my children, no amount of cheeseparing was going to make private fees possible. From the age of three to 18, they went to our local state schools. They flourished academically, made lots of friends and enjoyed two advantages I never had: they walked to school, and mixed comfortably with children from every background. Why pay fees? I wondered. State schools were best. Alison Colwell makes me think again. In 2014, she was appointed head teacher at Ebbsfleet

In the two generations since Watergate, the image of the journalist has gone from that of plucky truth-seeker to sensationalist and partisan hack. Somewhere along the way the fresh-faced idealists of All the President’s Men gave way to the dissociative anti-hero of Nightcrawler. Corporate-driven news values? Probably. Phone hacking? Definitely. But what grates more is the suspicion that journalism is a clique that protects its own, disdains its audience and passes off its attitudes and preferences as the neutral norm. The perception isn’t entirely wide of the mark. Lyra McKee was a one-woman union for the reputation of journalism. To her it was more than blue-tick-on-blue-tick gossip-shopping and SEO-chasing junk