Democracy was born in the public square. The Athenian agora was the central meeting place of an engaged citizenry where business was transacted, social life flourished and a common direction for the people was determined. The idea of a public square – where individuals operate in a relationship of trust and shared endeavour – is
Home In a day that upset the apple cart of party politics, Reform won the Runcorn and Helsby by-election by six votes, with 38.72 per cent of the vote, compared with Labour’s 52.9 per cent last year. Of 1,641 wards in England up for election, Reform won 677. The Tories lost 676, winning only 317.
‘What!? But they won’t let you in!’ and ‘What!? But they’ll detain you at the border!’ and ‘What!? But they’re all nuts over there!’ were just some of the responses from friends and colleagues at my announcement that I was heading to the US for three and a half weeks’ work. But my visa was
This week we celebrated VE Day. When Pericles remembered the dead from the war against Sparta in his famous Funeral Speech of 431 bc, he was not celebrating victory – the war would end in 404 bc with Athens’s surrender – but doing something quite new: he was reflecting on what Athens stood for and
19th-century cyber crime M &S and the Co-op have suffered cyber attacks. Cyber crime didn’t quite begin with the internet. The first record of an attack on a communications network was in the city of Tours in 1834, where the Blanc brothers traded government bonds in Bordeaux and bribed the operator of the country’s telegraph
Ka-shing in Sir: Ian Williams highlights (‘Chasing the dragon’, 3 May) the degree to which the Chinese state has acquired interests in the UK. Yet he overlooks a few tentacles of the Asian octopus that have curled around my home region of eastern England. Swathes of high-quality arable land are being subsumed into solar farms,
