Saturday 25 April 2026 The intellectual fashions of philosophy, like those of politics, tend to move in cycles. There are periods in which abstraction and system-building dominate, followed by moments of scepticism in which the very possibility of systematic thought is called into question. The mid twentieth century was one such moment. In the aftermath of two catastrophic world wars, and amidst the rise of scientific modernity, philosophers turned with renewed urgency to the

Saturday 25 April 2026 The forthcoming visit of King Charles III to the United States arrives at a moment of subtle but unmistakable strain within Anglo-American diplomacy. Such visits, once ritualised affirmations of a “special relationship”, now unfold against a shifting geopolitical landscape in which sentiment, history and strategic necessity do not always move in harmonious alignment. The pageantry will be immaculate; the underlying questions less so. At its core Anglo-A

Saturday 25 April 2026 There are cities that endure war as a matter of geography — and there are cities that transform it into a matter of identity. Lviv, long celebrated as a cultural capital of Ukraine, has in the years since the full-scale invasion of Russia in February 2022 become something more intricate and more defiant: a place where art is not merely preserved under duress, but weaponised in the service of national survival. The phrase ‘artists under fire’ is not meta

Saturday 25 April 2026 The European Union’s mutual assistance clause, contained within Article 42(7) of the Treaty on European Union, has long been treated as a constitutional curiosity rather than a central pillar of European defence. Drafted in an era when reliance upon the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was assumed to be perpetual and unquestioned, she was conceived as a political statement of solidarity rather than an operational war-fighting commitment. Yet the shift

Saturday 25 April 2026 Winters are colder, summers are hotter. The question of whether Ukraine is suffering from climate change is on its face almost too simple — for it invites a binary answer to a phenomenon that is gradual, uneven and often obscured by the far more immediate violences of war. Yet beneath the thunder of artillery and the bureaucratic speed of reconstruction lies a quieter transformation of the land itself, one that has begun to reshape Ukraine’s agriculture