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 ...

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: ...

When Keith Jarrett turned up at the Opera House in Cologne at the end of January 1975 to perform a concert of solo piano improvisations on the promise of a Bösendorfer grand piano, he despaired at the ...

Fassbinder, Herzog, Wenders: from the 1960s onwards, Germany produced countless top-tier filmmakers. The most towering figure, though, was undoubtedly Alexander Kluge, who died this March at the age ...

“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 ...

It is one of the great might-have-beens in modern British history. In June 2003, Gordon Brown ruled out joining the euro, for the time being. The road to Brexit 13 years later was a long and winding ...

Andy Burnham has announced an ambitious plan to create a Number 10 North, which is fine as far as it goes. But why stop there? If Britain is serious about devolving power, levelling up, rebalancing ...

If you read a judgment of a US federal court, especially an opinion of a Supreme Court justice, you will see respectful, almost lyrical references to the common law of England as at the point of ...

An English funeral hits with full force at the moment when a stiff upper-lip momentarily wobbles and a steady voice begins to choke. Keir Starmer’s eulogy to himself achieved the same effect. Arguably ...

There are many things that can be said of the now-abandoned scheme to send asylum seekers from the United Kingdom to Rwanda. It was illiberal and misconceived. It had at its heart a contradiction, in ...

As so often happens with infectious diseases, the Hantavirus outbreak on the Dutch cruise ship MV Hondius arose from a series of chance encounters. Its rapid containment, meanwhile, depended on a ...

What is liberalism? It means and has meant many different things. We speak of market liberalism, social liberalism and cultural liberalism. Anti-clerical atheists have been liberals, as have reformist ...