Features
Upper-class darling of the metropolitan elite
Harriet Harman’s drive for equal rights has resulted in the divisive identity politics that so alienates traditional working-class Labour voters
Regathering the Russian lands: the rationale for Putin’s war in Ukraine
The president’s inflammatory rhetoric is informed by two centuries of Russian nationalist thought centring on a distrust of Europe and a mission to recover all the lands of “Ancient Rus”
How the world turns a blind eye to African slavery
Investigating the slave-owners of the Sahara, where more than 100,000 people were born into inherited captivity
Can science hold all the answers?
Revisiting the thinkers who challenged the scientific method’s claims to have a monopoly on the truth and offer privileged access to reality
Remembering an “effervescently affable man”
Kurt Vonnegut at 100
A colossus unjustly ignored
Britain has never warmed to Rubens, whose finest works can be seen in Antwerp
Philip Larkin: the man who was always right
The great man’s peerless poetry is not the “soppy stuff” of cheap romanticism, but a harsh, unsparing — and often beautiful — look at the world
Biting the hand that feeds them
So-called “radical” performance art is little more than a publicly-funded alliance between the art establishment and faux-rebellious poseurs
Mugged by a mud-caked spud
Farmers’ markets are a rip-off aimed at food snobs and posturing fools with more money than sense
The curious cult of the friend of fascism
Ayn Rand’s vile philosophy was one of the crudest ever to be taken seriously, but attracts the devotion of fundamentalists for whom she could do no wrong