My teenage self was right. Brigitte Bardot, who died this weekend, symbolised sex and freedom. It’s why I had a poster of her on my study wall at school in which she was topless in a white cowboy hat and faded blue denims with the zip undone to reveal that she had no knickers. Needless to say it was not long before someone burnt a hole in her crotch ...

New Year’s Eve is the party we don’t need but can’t get rid of. The location varies according to geography. City-dwellers gather in public squares and cheer at midnight as the skyrockets explode overhead and add more fumes to the blanket of urban smog. In the countryside, revellers meet in freezing farmhouse kitchens and drink bathtub gin while ...

‘Where are the snows of yesteryear?’ lamented the French poet François Villon. Professional writers around the world are devising their own variation on this refrain: ‘Where has the money I used to make from speechwriting gone?’ Is it the economy? Yes. Is it because our business leaders have all the charisma and moral courage of East German politicians ...

Africa’s elephants are out of control, and the continent’s people, and plants, are paying the price. Far too many elephants, with far too little territory – surrounded by ever more people and with culling hampered by Western animal rights groups and green activists – risk contributing to a wildlife-induced forest ecocide. Millions of mopane, baobab and ...

In 2001, the United Nations released a quietly influential report titled Replacement Migration: Is It a Solution to Declining and Ageing Populations? The paper examined a growing problem facing developed nations: falling birth rates, ageing populations, and a shrinking proportion of working-age citizens needed to support social and economic ...

A Royal Commission into the Bondi Hanukkah terrorist attack would expose Labor’s deepest fear. That is why it has been resisted so ferociously. Such an inquiry would not merely catalogue bureaucratic missteps; it could trigger class actions of unprecedented scale and demolish the fiction that this atrocity was unforeseeable. This was Australia’s ...

There’s a strange pattern in how the UK discusses policy, and once you notice it you realise it’s everywhere. What happens is that there’s a problem, often something which makes us less safe. The problem will be fundamentally a result of policy, and often something we’re ‘forced’ to endure because of laws we have created. No one feels able to step ...