Julian Assange remains lodged in the Ecuadorian Embassy in Knightsbridge while the Correa Government decides whether to grant him political asylum. Meanwhile, the WikiLeaks founder remains committed to standing for the Australian Senate whenever the next Federal Election is called. Whether he can campaign on the ground or not will depend on his circumstances but…
Alan Turing, born 100 years ago this week, was one of the scientific geniuses of the 20th century, a key codebreaker for Britain in the Second World War and a pioneer of computing. In 1952 he was prosecuted for being gay, chemically castrated and died two years later from cyanide poisoning. Today London’s Science Museum…
There will be a moment of history this week when Queen Elizabeth shakes hands with Martin McGuinness, first deputy minister of the north of Ireland. The piquancy of the occasion is that McGuinness was the former chief of staff of the IRA when it was accused of blowing up the Queen’s cousin, Lord Mountbatten. Mountbatten…
Jimmy Carr is a hugely popular comedian, one of the smartest of the new generation of British entertainers. Like thousands of the rich here, he’s been using an offshore account, legally enough, to minimise his tax bill. This week the Murdoch-owned Times ran a report on his tax affairs and those of pro-Tory entertainer Gary…
British children on the breadline Here’s the reality of today’s Britain: 2.2m children are living in households on the brink of extreme poverty, and four out of five teachers see children arriving at school hungry. The figures emerge this week from The Guardian’s “Breadline Britain” project, an investigation into the human impact of the…
AT school in Townsville just after World War Two we used to sing “There’ll always be an England” at the top of our tiny voices. The robust patriotic song, written in 1939, looks a little shakey in 2012. In Britain today most people accept that the country is on its knees but citizens – at…
I went to the British Library’s current exhibition anticipating that it would be interesting. What I didn’t expect was that it would move me to tears. Writing Britain is a history of landscape presented through works of literature, from the original manuscript of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to Dickens and Woolf. It reunited me with some…
I first arrived in London 45 years ago on the P&O passenger liner Oronsay. It was a six-week trip that cost me 200 bucks. I spent my first night in the Mount Pleasant Hotel, a two-star lodging previously used as a hostel for drunks and down-and-outs. This time I arrived on Royal Thai Airways (Brisbane-Bangkok)…
John Lanchester’s novel Capital, which I began reading in the plane on the way over, is great preparation for a visit here. In it he takes the inhabitants of a gentrified London street – everyone from the financial trader to the family in the corner shop – through the GFC. It’s a funny, touching, hugely…
In case you missed the news, Brazil has deposed Britain as the sixth largest economy in the world, according to the annual world economic league table compiled by the Centre for Economic and Business Research.Britain’s steady economic and industrial decline is one of the most remarkable events of the past century, on a par with…
