BUSINESS

For those who lived through the cold war, the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989, was an unforgettable moment. The sinister watch towers with their searchlights and armed guards, the minefields in no-man’s land, the notorious Checkpoint Charlie border post, and the Wall itself – all were swept aside in an extraordinary, … Read more

Next month, Donald Trump will welcome a poverty-stricken family to peruse his plans for a $300m glitzy state ballroom in the White House. The event will be staged as part of National Poverty in America Awareness Month, the time every year when charities document the number of US residents surviving on low incomes. Of course, … Read more

In my neighbourhood bookshop, La Galerne, the shelves are well organised. On the ground floor, there’s a corner for foreign literature and another for French literature, with the latest releases right at the front. For nonfiction and essays, you used to have to go downstairs. But two years ago, they put a new table in … Read more

Keir Starmer’s government has been told a closer EU trade deal is a “strategic necessity” for companies in Britain as growing numbers of exporters find it tougher to do business under the UK’s post-Brexit agreement. Calling on Labour to accelerate its reset with Brussels, the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) said the UK’s existing trade … Read more

In 1932, the Berlin-born writer Gabriele Tergit set out to memorialise what she saw as a disappearing world: the lives and fates of the city’s Jews. By 1945, after fleeing the Nazis first to Czechoslovakia, then Palestine, then Britain, Tergit had finished her novel, but it took until 1951 for The Effingers to be published. … Read more

There are people who argue that Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine is not motivated by fears or imperial ambitions, but by other countries’ disrespect. Russia once commanded authority as one of the world’s two superpowers, but it has since forfeited that status. It knows it has lost the respect of other countries (Barack Obama famously … Read more

Predictions of the demise of letter writing are not new. The invention of the telegraph and the rise of the postcard were both seen as potential threats to a more leisurely, reflective form of communication. Yet by the close of the 20th century, more letters were being sent than ever, as social correspondence began to … Read more

When Keir Starmer stood on the Labour conference stage in 2018 and defied Jeremy Corbyn to call for a second Brexit referendum with remain as an option, it put him in pole position to become the next Labour leader. Starmer must now feel a sense of deja vu watching Wes Streeting, the most out-and-out pretender … Read more