“I almost worship him as if he were a god. I have never felt such an extravagant admiration for anybody.” So the 22-year-old Bertrand Russell wrote to his fiancée Alys Pearsall Smith in November 1894.

Keir Starmer once stood up for protesters. Now he calls them terrorists As a human rights lawyer, Starmer defended direct action on grounds of conscience. But the world is now a much less forgiving ...

This year’s Thinkers are pushing boundaries and building connections; their ideas are novel, inspiring and challenging. But the list is not exhaustive: when you voted for your Top Thinker, we hope you ...

Welcome to this week’s Weekly Constitutional, where a judgment or other formal document is used as a basis of a discussion about law and policy. This week’s legal texts are section 19 of the Public ...

Imagine that a populist, hard-right party takes office and begins dismantling democracy. Except this time, it’s in Britain ...

The local elections are a four-horse race Labour, the Conservatives, Reform or the Liberal Democrats could win the most votes on 1st May. But which party has the most to gain?

In the months after a decisive election, voting intention polls have no predictive value. That is why I have largely ignored them so far. But tracked over time, they do tell us something. That is why ...

The hyperbole on book jackets—both the plot summaries and the lists of adulatory adjectives that go with them—have long frustrated authors, but no one would dispute that a good blurb has crucial ...

When should a democracy stop politicians from running for office? Looking at the legal barriers now faced by Donald Trump and by Marine Le Pen ...

The obsessives tally 18 Beatles songs mentioning “sun” or “sunshine”. That fits with their luminous place in the national story: a burst of colour and sound that presaged the passing of postwar ...

In late January, Nigel Farage stood in front of a packed Reform party fundraiser in Oswald’s, an exclusive private members’ club in Mayfair, central London. Farage encouraged the 100-strong crowd to ...

Rearmament doesn’t have to be on the backs of the poor The PM and chancellor should ignore right-wing pundits and look back to Keynes in 1940 to see how to fund defence fairly ...