There is a new permanent secretary in Whitehall, and his name is David Dinsmore. No reason why you should have heard of him: he’s been toiling away on behalf of Rupert Murdoch for nearly 22 years and ...

Ahead of the recent Uxbridge and South Ruislip byelection to replace Boris Johnson as MP (who’d stepped down in disgrace after being found guilty of misleading parliament), 25,000 leaflets were posted ...

On 8th October 1940, a Tuesday night of high winds, the skies above London were clouded over with 300 German bombers that had flown inland from Dymchurch, Kent; German troops were marching into ...

If there is one meeting of minds I’d love to drag out of history and into the AI era, it would be that shared by Alan Turing and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The real-life hookups between the young father of ...

In Dublin—where Spanish students, British stag dos and American genealogists look for a good time—a statue just off the main thoroughfare has developed a groping problem. Next month, a protection ...

In the run-up to every election in my Middle England market town, a light drizzle of campaign posters appears in windows. Mostly Labour, or “the Red Team”, as my youngest daughter calls them.

“There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face,” says Duncan, justifying his deluded trust in the treacherous thane of Cawdor. Yet the face of the newly made thane, Macbeth, “is as a book ...

Is it fair to criticise a nonfiction book for what it doesn’t include? Most would argue that it isn’t unless the omissions materially alter the subject being tackled. And this is where Lissa Evans’s ...

Joining the protesters against the new inheritance tax laws affecting farmers in Westminster last November, the leader of Reform UK, Nigel Farage, wore a flat cap, checked shirt and tie, Barbour waxed ...

Prospect receives commission when you buy a book using this page. Thank you for supporting us. Robert Maxwell was always a gambler. The press baron who raided the pension fund of the Daily Mirror and ...

When the writer David Foster Wallace died in 2008, he left behind a manuscript for an unfinished novel, The Pale King, as well as an oeuvre that has come to define him as the voice of a generation: ...

“Politics,” the German sociologist Max Weber said, is “a strong and slow boring of hard boards.” That’s boring as a verb, of course, meaning drilling. (In German: “Ein starkes langsames Bohren von ...