According to the Duke of Wellington, the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.Fast forward almost exactly two hundred years, shift focus to the Olympics, really just sublimated warfare after all, and the only thing that's changed is that Eton is actually one of the battlefields....

We're nearly half way through the London Olympics and firmly in the grip of glorious delusions.

We're deluded to think the ancient games were some sort of heroic contest that spread purity and peace. The athletes were professional, often cheats, the sponsors bribed their way to glory...

Jessica Ghawi was, to say the least, unlucky. She was the 24-year-old sports journalist who survived a mass shooting in a Toronto shopping mall last month, only to decide to go to the premiere of the new Batman movie, in Denver on Friday. Even by North American standards, to run...

It's one of the great ironies of history that the last line of defence for the greatest empire the world has ever known proved to be the Patagonian Toothfish. It's an ugly and endangered denizen of the South Atlantic that the British government relied on, in vain as it turned...

I have no personal animus against Andy Murray, and I dare say it is irritating not to win a tennis match, but precisely when did we turn into a nation of snivelling losers?

At what point in the history of the last hundred years did the stiff upper lip start...

It's sad, but undeniably true, that our rubbish tells more about us than our art. Take the literary sensation of our times - you must have heard about it. It's called Fifty Shades of Grey, a poorly written, passingly pornographic novel that has become the fastest selling book of all...

Thirty years after the end of the Falklands War, Argentina's president, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, has launched a diplomatic campaign to gain control of the islands of such breathtaking hypocrisy she makes Jimmy Carr look like Martin Bell.

At the UN, in the breaks of the latest G20 summit, every...