When I heard Liz Truss, Britain’s prime minister for barely three weeks, on the radio on Thursday, September 29, I couldn’t help remember that moment in American politics when Donald Trump became seriously unfunny. It was late 2015, during the presidential campaign, and Mr Trump was no longer God’s gift…

The British joke factory runs on politicians’ blindness to their comedic aspects. Kamikwasi Kwarteng and Librium Liz are the factory’s two most recent manufactures. They refer to two people whose positions at least would render them ripe for comedic send-up, if not their actions and attitudes. Remember, satire and parody…

There’s lots to say about the excellent interview that Quartz did with former UN deputy secretary general Mark Malloch-Brown on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, but mainly the sense that even if multilateralism isn’t dead, its tool — the United Nations — is a bit blunt. Click here…

In all the days that the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II lay in state in London, the British government remained shtum, imperious and foxy. By all accounts, the government of Prime Minister Liz Truss pursued its grand and sweeping plans, secure in the knowledge that the avalanche of royal coverage…

Had Somerset Maugham known Ken Starr he would probably have written a short story that revolved around him. The life and dubious legacy of the American lawyer and judge were tailor-made for fiction, if only to inject a sense of the real and believable into something that seems quite fantastical…

In the blitz of royal coverage from Britain, there has been little attention paid to a notable passing across the pond. The death on September 13 of American lawyer and judge Ken Starr, aged 76, in his home state Texas. The Guardian only put out an obituary on September 19…

Historian David Cannadine begins his chapter in ‘ The Invention of Tradition ‘, the 1983 book edited by two Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, by discussing what it means to enjoy over-the-top pageantry. He quotes ‘The Black Book’, an 1820 critique of the English Establishment, which reads: “Pageantry and show…

The bagpipe-playing man in a tartan kilt is an invention, a wildly successful one. In ‘ The Invention of Tradition ‘, the 1983 book edited by two Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, the late historian Hugh Trevor-Roper discusses the 17th century invention of “the whole concept of a distinct Highland…