This has absolutely nothing to do with the coronavirus. But I find it fascinating and it is the culmination of a long search, much like the Hunting of the Snark, which I thought would never end. I am ...

In 1975, the United Kingdom government distributed three pamphlets to voters in the weeks before the referendum on our continued membership of what was then the Common Market. I have reproduced them ...

In the long-ago summer of 2010, I found myself in the beautiful harbour of Sevastopol, surveying the rival fleets of Russia and Ukraine as they rode at anchor in the lovely Crimean sunshine. One great ...

Time for a quotation from Confucius (Or K’ung Fu-tzu, in the sensible old Wade-Giles transcription), (Book 13, Chapter 3) ‘If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of ...

PH: Is this about ‘comprehension’? Or is it about self-serving prejudice? What ‘crucial facts’ does the leaked e-mail miss? Let us see. Note that the National Endowment for Democracy is a largely ...

Whatever happened to the old Policeman’s ABC (equally useful to journalists and politicians, in my view) – ‘Assume Nothing. Believe Nobody. Check Everything’? It seems to have been abandoned by her ...

A leaked email last night dramatically indicated that the UN’s poison gas watchdog had butchered and censored a critical report on an alleged chemical attack in Syria. If substantiated, the ...

We’ll be sorry when the Monarchy is gone, which it will pretty soon be if we all go on behaving like this. If you want a Monarchy, you need grown-ups, not just to sit on the throne, but to support it.

My trains returned to ‘normal’ this morning, which means that the ‘train manager’ now once again urges us commuters twice daily to ‘report suspicious behaviour’ . Apart from telling us (after it’s too ...

All right, I admit it, it’s not that brief. I didn’t have time to shorten it. But what follows is a condensed history of the argument about who should control Crimea, one which still rages and which ...

It is curious what stirs people’s emotions. I would have expected my article on smacking to have attracted the most attention when my column was published yesterday. There were a few remarkably stupid ...

Lemmings throw themselves off cliffs in mass suicides, right? Actually, no, they don't. A famous award-winning 1950s film, allegedly showing them doing this, was faked. That paragon of responsibility, ...