This piece goes in search of a genius who went to Harvard aged 15, wrote comic songs that were a huge hit and with which he toured the world, then almost entirely vanished from the stage. Talking to People magazine in 1982, as ever he had the best words to describe some of what had changed “Things I once thought were funny are scary – now I often feel like a resident of Pompeii who has been asked for some humorous comments on lava.”
While this piece is nominally a book review, that task is witheringly dispatched in the first sentence. What follows is a nuanced and compelling profile of Theresa May and her relationship with her colleagues in the Conservative Party over many years, starting from university days.
A piece positing that those who hope for the impeachment of President Trump might be missing some of the consequences.
A profile of the unique character who ploughed £7.5m into the campaign to leave the EU. He has now set his sights on a broad populist democratic movement to take on what he sees as the flawed and corrupt democratic institutions governing the UK.
Some perhaps interesting context comes from a Human Rights Watch analysis of Fidel Castro’s regime.
Tim Kaine, the first major elected politician outside Illinois to endorse Barack Obama in 2008, finds himself on the ticket eight years later.
A profile of Yousef Al Otaiba, the Ambassador for the United Arab Emirates to Washington, by many accounts a supreme political operator who has access at the highest echelons of US government.
A profile of China’s leader that makes makes an unusual comparison – to Phillip II of Spain, “on whose desk in a palace near Madrid all the problems of his 16th-century empire landed”. An insight into the very highest echelons of Chinese political life.
A fascinating January 2016 profile of Jeremy Heywood, the man heading the UK civil service. He has been an instrumental part of government during the reign of the last three Prime Ministers, and reportedly has a seat at every table that matters.