When you gaze at the square-jawed, brycreemed glisten of Mitt Romney, you do not immediately picture the kidnapping of a democratically elected president, nor the installation of a tyrant who slaughtered at least half a million people. Yet that is what this man has presented as a model for the...

There has been a strange hole in Western gay politics -- until now. We have, understandably, been focused on our own national battles for dignity: to get married, and not get fired for being gay, or bullied into despair as teenagers. But while we were starting to win, millions of...

The two most dreaded words in any office any time, anywhere, are the same -- management consultants. Their arrival rumbles through a workplace like the approaching thwump-thwump of the T-Rex in Jurassic Park, rattling our desks and making us all fear we will be picked up and gored at random....

In the twentieth century, all the nightmare-novels of the future imagined books would be burned. In the twenty-first century, our dystopias imagine a world where books are forgotten. To pluck just one, Gary Steynghart's novel Super Sad True Love Story describes a world where everybody is obsessed with...

Here is a news story that could determine whether you live or die. Many of the world's scientists are warning that one of the mightiest weapons doctors have against sickness is being rendered useless -- so a few people can get richer, for a while. If they aren't stopped soon,...

Is there a more consistently hilarious sight in Britain than the endless parade of slavering monarchists trying to convince us the Windsor family is the embodiment of virtue and hard work? Today is the 90th birthday of Philip Mountbatten. Ordinarily, I would wish him a happy day, as I would...

Sometimes, the most revealing aspect of the shrieking babble of the 24/7 news agenda is the silence. Often the most important facts are hiding beneath the noise, unmentioned and undiscussed. So the fact that Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), is facing trial for allegedly...

Larry Flynt has won. He was America's pioneer pornographer -- the man who fought against a still-Puritan nation all the way to the Supreme Court for the right to get vaginal close-ups into the grasp of every young man. This fight got him jailed. It got him shot. It got...

Sometimes, there are hinge-points in human history -- moments when we have to choose between an exuberant descent into lunacy, and a still, sober voice offering us a sane way out. Usually, we can only see them when we look back from a distance. In 1793, the great democrat Thomas...

When the British Prime Minister David Cameron gazed into the dewy eyes of a husky and promised to lead "the greenest government ever", what did you think that would involve?

Probably not an attempt to sell off all Britain's trees to logging companies. Probably not a...

Scramble the film backwards. Rewind. Go back to the day 10 years ago when the air here in Manhattan was thick with ash and Osama bin Laden was gloating. There were two options for the United States government -- to pick up a scalpel, or to pick up a blowtorch....

Tarell Alvin McCraney has made an unusual journey in his thirty years of life -- from the slums of Miami, where his crack-addicted mother died of AIDS and his brother ended up in jail, to writer-in-residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company. But when he glides past a large marble bust...

Since the election of Barack Obama, the Republican Party has proved that one of its central intellectual arguments was right all along. They have long claimed that evolution is a myth believed in only by whiny liberals -- and it turns out they were onto something. Every six months, the...

I want to tell you the story of a man called Mark Wright, and how he died - because, thanks to the British Prime Minister David Cameron and a campaign of deceit in the right-wing press, stories like this are certain to happen a lot more from now on. It...

Okay, let's cut a deal here. If Britain can afford to spend tens of millions of pounds on the royal wedding next week, we have to spend an equal amount distributing anti-nausea pills across the land -- to all of us who can't bear to see our country embarrass itself...

Most of us have a low feeling that we are not being told the real reasons for the war in Libya. David Cameron's instinctive response to the Arab revolutions was to jump on a plane and tour the palaces of the region's dictators selling them the most high-tech...

We are living in the middle of a great gayby boom. En masse, gay people are trading the dance floor for a baby-vomit-and-puke-filled floor of their own. The latest convert from baby oil to, well, baby oil is Elton John, whose baby boy Zachary was born on Christmas Day. Of...

The Tea Party is gazing lovingly across the Atlantic, with saliva drooling across its chin, at David Cameron's massive program of state-slashing -- bringing the biggest cuts here since the 1920s. But yesterday, there was a moment when his finance minister George Osborne was unveiling his annual budget yesterday when...

The day after his wife's funeral, Steven Dent walked out of his house, "and I just kept walking," he says. "I walked and walked. I never stopped. I couldn't stand to look back, or to stop moving, ever again." Now, four years later, he sleeps most nights under a bridge...

Before the Second World War, the Ministry of War confidently predicted what would happen when London was bombed from the air by Nazi planes. There would be, they warned, "a mass outbreak of hysterical neurosis among the civilian population." For every one person injured, there would be dozens who lose...