“I almost worship him as if he were a god. I have never felt such an extravagant admiration for anybody.” So the 22-year-old Bertrand Russell wrote to his fiancée Alys Pearsall Smith in November 1894.

This week’s special episode of Media Confidential coincides with ITV’s new drama The Hack, about the phone-hacking scandal which led to the closure of the News of the World, the Leveson Inquiry, and a ...

In October 2023, Brechin, a Scottish town near the North Sea, was hit by a wall of water that changed it forever. During Storm Babet, a record 150 to 200mm of rain fell in parts of the area. The ...

Fyodor Dostoevsky—rigorous dialectician and grand inquisitor into the human soul—is having a moment. The American “new right” has enlisted the Russian author in the debate over “cancel culture”; and, ...

In the last year, the United States has transitioned from flawed liberal democracy to competitive authoritarianism. In this new regime, institutions as diverse as universities, law firms and news ...

Welcome to this week’s Weekly Constitutional, where a judgment or other formal document is used as a basis of a discussion about law and policy. This week’s legal texts are section 19 of the Public ...

The Americans are even more prone than the British to the biographical doorstopper as a way in which to honour the lives, minute by minute, of their famous dead. Walter Isaacson and Jon Meacham are ...

“LinkedIn doesn’t know me anymore,” someone complained to me recently. “What do you mean?” I asked. She explained that the platform has replaced the old “recommended jobs” section, which used to show ...

Talking about racism and antisemitism can get you into trouble, as Diane Abbott knows well. The MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington has been suspended from the Labour Party for a second time for ...

Its owners do, however, have one problem. “That overflow pipe,” said Dawn Farnworth, who established By the Wye with her husband, Steve, five years ago. “It never just trickles out, it gushes out.

“I just spent four days in Hungary, a conservative country criticised by elites across the west. I saw no crime. No homeless people. No riots. No unrest. No drugs. No mass immigration. No broken ...

F Scott Fitzgerald was fulsome in his praise and Sinclair Lewis declared it the “first book to catch Manhattan”. Published a few months after Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, John Dos Passos’s novel ...