Viktor Orban’s message to the American right, worshipfully gathered to hear him on May 20 on the banks of the Danube, was stark: do as I do. It is a powerful exhortation for Mr Orban practises what he preaches. In order to remake Hungary in the 12 years since he…

We owe it to The Washington Post to join the dots in what Hungary’s Viktor Orban is urging the American right to accomplish: to literally, call time on history. To literally push back the ideas that became powerfully irresistible and prevalent more than half-a-century ago. For, Mr Orban once declared…

On May 20, Hungarian leader Viktor Orban told a special meeting of US conservatives that friendly media outlets were key to the rise to power as well as retention of it. The word “friendly” is mine. Mr Orban said the following: “Have your own media.” For a journalist this is…

A French-style chateau owned by a banking heiress in the English countryside hardly seems the place to ponder women’s lib and the democratisation of society after a brutal European war. But Waddesdon Manor, Alice de Rothschild’s sprawling Buckinghamshire estate, tells a story of inevitable change in a period not unlike today…

Off the back of Professor Joseph Nye’s insightful analysis of Ukraine’s soft power, here are the already visible effects of that currency: ** First and foremost, Eurovision. Ukraine won the 66th Eurovision song contest. In the court of European public opinion, voting by telephone, Stefania by Kalush Orchestra won, big…

Birthdays are on my mind at the moment, more particularly, how did we come to celebrate them in the way we do. Well, as it’s my birthday today, I didn’t want to do too much work to investigate the answer and turned to ‘1843 magazine’ (paywall) to find out more. …

The Lebanese legislative elections have been hard to predict. Technically, it should have all been so clear. Considering the country suffered a devastating economic collapse and the equally devastating and tragic 2020 Beirut port explosion, one might have thought that Lebanese voters would want to sweep away the political elite…

Political scientist Joseph Nye, a former Dean of the Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, recently offered an insightful analysis on soft power . It’s safe to say Ukraine has it, by the cart load, nearly three months after Russia’s unprovoked invasion. The situation right now can usefully be analysed in…