Watching Kim Jong-un

The sorry inheritance of a certain young Korean. What would it be like to be told at age 27 that for the next four decades you were going to have to kill, starve and oppress millions of people if you wanted to stay alive? A strange question you may think, and ... Read More...

2011: freedom or bust?

Daniel Kalder looks back at the various vernal revolts of 2011 and argues we shouldn't get too excited. Sometime around the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a long period of abject Western media failure regarding the Putin phenomenon began. Journalists were so busy making fatuous comparisons to Stalin or hyping The New ... Read More...

Abolish capitalism!

Capitalism for and against. There's a lot of it about, mostly against. But, this thing 'capitalism' - it doesn't really describe anything in particular, does it? Capitalism, at its most basic, is an arrangement where there are property rights and market relations governed, to some degree of effectiveness, by the rule ... Read More...

Invictus Redivivus

Nige examines a 19th Century poem that has experienced a sudden revival in popularity, having been cited as an inspiration by both Nelson Mandela and, um, Gordon Brown... My father's taste in poetry was that of an upright Edwardian. He had a personal anthology of poems of moral uplift and patriotic ... Read More...