Section: New Statesman (The United Kingdom)
Five things you need to know today: May and Hunt prepare retaliation against Iran
Plus, Tories brace for Johnson as contest concludes, Hong Kong mob violence leaves 45 hospitalised, and Ukrainian comedian and rock star enter coalition talks. Iran tanker seizure: UK set to announce new sanctions Theresa May will chair a meeting of the government’s emergency committee Cobra at 10:30am this morning after a British-flagged...
Five things you need to know today: Democratic women hit back at Trump’s racist attacks
Plus, Tory candidates declare Irish backstop dead, Khan rejects the Tulip tower and Italian police seize far-right weapons stash. “Don’t take the bait” The four Democratic congresswomen targeted by Donald Trump’s racist attacks have dismissed his remarks as a “disruption and a distraction” and have urged Americans “not to take the...
For Germany to have allowed non-Nato member Ireland to set parameters on Brexit is a gamble
The EU’s dependence on Nato for security and Germany’s dependence on Russia for energy has created a disjunction at the heart of the European project. Geopolitical matters have long raised awkward questions for the European Union. Indeed, its existence is in part a geopolitical paradox. For a political entity with substantial...
Vladimir Putin’s war on the “liberal idea”
His targets are not just economic liberalism but also political liberalism, a system based on the rights of individuals and civil society Vladimir Putin arrived at the G20 in Osaka, Japan, as the victor of an ideological world war. This was in part due to the Russian president’s distance from his home country: for a few hours he was able to...
How Vasily Grossman became a thorn in Stalin’s side
s Putin’s Russia glorifies its Soviet past, Grossman’s urgent, questioning voice needs to be heard again. In Moscow on 23 July 1962, the writer Vasily Grossman had a three-hour audience with the Kremlin’s “grey cardinal”, Mikhail Suslov. For 30 years Suslov was the Soviet Communist Party’s chieftain in charge of ideology,...
How Boris Johnson became Britain’s most successful stand-up comedian
On Have I Got News For You, I saw the Conservative frontrunner learn how to joke his way out of trouble. There’s a scene in the sitcom Outnumbered from 2011 in which a group of school children ask a German exchange student to name his favourite British comedians. “Ricky Gervais,” he says “and that man who plays a funny character, the fat...
Is the United States heading towards war with Iran?
If it happens, this would be a war fought by the US against a far more militarily advanced nation. Is the United States heading towards war with Iran? US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo insists that the Trump administration does not want war – but also insists that Iran is behind the attacks on two oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman, while not ruling...
Deposed dictators have often found somewhere to flee to – so where would Putin go?
Even with so much plundered wealth, which respectable state and political leadership would accept such a fugitive? In 1989-90, the Communist bloc’s rapid collapse and German reunification cut short Vladimir Putin’s promising KGB career in Dresden. Just a decade later, he was president of Russia and, excepting Dmitry Medvedev’s...
The trail-blazing art of Lee Krasner
Krasner was a pioneer of abstract expressionism, but it took the death of her husband Jackson Pollock for her to start painting like one. In the years immediately following the end of the Second World War, a radical new style shifted the centre of the art world from Paris to New York. This transatlantic transposition was driven by immigrant...
How the Kremlin sees the rest of the world
Russian analysts reckon the US will be less focused on intervening around the world and will be more nationalist, mercantilist and interest-focused. Thomas Hobbes described the life of a man as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. The Kremlin’s view of the world is dark and Hobbesian. But on a recent visit to Moscow, I was struck by...
