With friends like these, who needs enemies? Saudi Arabia is out of control. After the brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, most likely on direct orders from the Saudi Crown Prince and de facto ruler Mohammed Bin Salman, it’s time for the West to sever ties with this regime of criminal des...

'Raising Happy Kids', 'The Conscious Parent', 'How to Talk so Kids Will Listen': Books like these, along with magazines, television shows and childcare experts, are all part of the multibillion-pound parenting industry. Follow our advice, they promise, and you can shape your children to be joyful...

On November 19th Intelligence Squared hosted the ultimate clash of civilisations: Greece vs Rome. Boris Johnson, Mayor of London and ardent classicist, made the case for Greece; while Mary Beard, Professor of Classics at Cambridge and redoubtable media star, championed Rome.

As Boris argued, the...

Brexit - the decision of the United Kingdom to leave the European Union. It's defenders say it made the country more independent it's detractors say it made the country less rich and powerful. Who's right? Join the debate.

Featuring Daniel Hannan, Robert Tombs, Dominic Grieve, Stella Creasy and...

China: a partner or adversary? Nathan Law, Alan Mendoza, Shirley Yu and Vince Cable debate how nations should approach China on questions of Taiwan, Hong Kong, Covid-19, economics and national security.

Imagine if swathes of the British countryside were allowed to be wild once again, if trees and rare plants could flourish and beavers, boars and white-tailed eagles could retake their place in the ecosystem. That’s the goal of the growing numbers of nature-lovers who support the idea of rewilding...

If ever a politician got a bum rap it’s Neville Chamberlain. He has gone down in history as the British prime minster whose policy of appeasement in the 1930s allowed the Nazis to flourish unopposed. He has never been forgiven for ceding part of Czechoslovakia to Hitler in the Munich Agreement of...

Hooray for porn! What would we be without it? Bored, repressed, frustrated. Porn nails the lie that sex is something we should be ashamed of. Porn tells us that that sex doesn't just come in vanilla flavour. Porn lights up the lives of the depressed, the lonely, the sexually unadventurous. It sp...

No one doubts the bravery of the thousands of men who flew and died in Bomber Command. The death rate was an appalling 44%. And yet until the opening of a monument in Green Park this year they have received no official recognition, with many historians claiming that the offensive was immoral and ...

Think opera and you think Verdi. Verdi created some of the most beloved operas of all time, from the romantic tragedy of La traviata and Rigoletto to the Shakespearian dramas of Macbeth, Otello and Falstaff.

Verdi's music transcends the barriers between high and low culture. Many of his arias co...

It’s over two months since we woke up to the shock news that the next president of the United States will be Donald Trump, and the whole world is trying to read the runes and work out what the next four years will hold for America and the rest of the world.

Many are decrying Trump’s election as ...

Many would argue that these are the fundamental goals of a good education. So why has Cambridge University taken to warning its students that the sexual violence in Titus Andronicus might be traumatic for them? Why are other universities in America and increasingly in Britain introducing measures...

What is going on in the Western democracies? From Britain’s vote for Brexit, to Donald Trump’s election victory in America and the growth of populist movements across Europe, voters are expressing their dissatisfaction with the status quo. Economic anxieties go some way to explain the phenomenon,...

The English language is going to the dogs. "Between you and I" is just one of the howlers those of us with linguistic sensibilities have to endure. The distinctions between words such as 'infer' and 'imply', and 'uninterested' and 'disinterested' are disappearing. Americanisms such as 'gotten', '...

We can’t say Karl Marx didn’t warn us: capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction. In their chase for ever higher profits, the capitalists shed workers for machines. The higher return on capital means that the share of profits rises and the share of wages falls, and soon the mass of the...

Jane Austen created the definitive picture of Georgian England – a landscape of Palladian mansions and handsome parsonages, peopled by rigidly-divided classes. No writer matches Austen’s sensitive ear for the hypocrisy and irony lurking beneath the genteel conversation. Never has a novelist writt...

The First World War is not called the Great War for nothing. It was the single most decisive event in modern history, as well as one of the bloodiest: by the time the war ended, some nine million soldiers had been killed. It was also a historical full stop, marking the definitive end of the Victo...

‘There is no immortality but the memory that is left in the minds of men.’ – Napoleon Bonaparte

How should we remember Napoleon, the man of obscure Corsican birth who rose to become emperor of the French and briefly master of Europe?

As the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo approached...

The United States of America has been the world’s foremost economic and military power, in the aftermath of World War II President Truman set out his Four Point Plan which stated that the U.S must uphold its unique responsibility to promote democracy and economic development around the world.

Ma...

"We're going to hell in a handcart." That's the cry of the deteriorationists who believe everything has got worse: the planet is overheating, population numbers are exploding, communities are being lost; liberal democracy is creaking on its foundations, and for twentysomethings prospects are look...

Does the world need more or less mass migration? Jenny Kleeman chaired this debate between Felix Marquardt, author of The New Nomads and author David Goodhart.

To some, the very word ‘migration’ generates fear, suspicion and even hatred. But according to Felix Marquardt, author of the acclaimed...