Wednesday 25 February 2026 To write about the personality of Joseph Stalin is to enter a territory in which psychology, ideology and power merge into something indivisible. In a totalitarian system, personality is not an incidental feature of rule — it is the architecture of the state. The Soviet Union under Stalin did not merely reflect Marxist–Leninist doctrine. She reflected the habits, fears, suspicions and iron discipline of one man. Stalin’s personality was not flamboya

Wednesday 25 February 2026 There are few institutions in the constitutional life of the United Kingdom more quietly radical than the jury. Twelve ordinary citizens — drawn at random from electoral registers — enter a courtroom, listen to evidence filtered through rules that have evolved over centuries, receive directions in law from a professional judge, and then retire to decide guilt or innocence. In that moment the immense coercive power of the state is placed in the hands

Wednesday 25 February 2026 Four years into Russia’s full-scale invasion, a grim secondary story has begun to harden into something closer to a pattern: growing reports that Russian soldiers are being brutalised not only by Ukraine’s firepower but by their own chain of command. These accounts vary in provenance and reliability, and none should be consumed with the credulous hunger of the internet. Yet taken together—across Russian investigative reporting in exile, Ukrainian an

Wednesday 25 February 2026 The transatlantic alliance has always been less an immutable structure than a living conversation — sometimes harmonious, sometimes acrimonious, occasionally perilously strained. The war in Ukraine, the rise of China, the use of trade tariffs as a tool of geopolitics, the politics of migration and energy, and the resurgence of ideological nationalism have all exposed divergences between the United States and her European allies. In this evolving env

Tuesday 24 February 2026 Boris Johnson’s recent intervention in the Ukraine debate is deliberately provocative—by design. In a BBC interview reported widely over the past few days, he argued that the United Kingdom and European allies should deploy non-combat troops to “peaceful” areas of Ukraine now, rather than waiting for a ceasefire, to convince Vladimir Putin that the West’s commitments are real rather than rhetorical.  The proposal lands in a political landscape that ha