I recently joined a tour in Bucharest of the Palace of Parliament, the gigantic folly built in the 1980s on the orders of the late Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, who was executed before he could see it finished.The statistics rehearsed by our guide were staggering: the

Hillary Clinton, the Democratic US presidential nominee, recently described supporters of her opponent, Donald Trump, as a “basket of deplorables”.It was neither a tactful nor an elegant phrase, and she later apologised for her remark.

Much has been written about Donald Trump’s peculiar hairstyle, the kind of puffy, dyed comb-over one would associate with a downmarket nightclub manager rather than a presidential candidate.Is there really any more to be said?

The former London mayor and left-wing Labour politician Ken Livingstone has been suspended from his party for claiming that Hitler was a Zionist in the early 1930s.According to Livingstone, “before he went mad and ended up killing 6 million Jews”, Hitler had merely wanted to expe

Following US President Barack Obama’s trailblazing visit to Cuba, a free concert by the Rolling Stones in Havana might seem like a relatively minor event.Obama revived relations with Cuba after more than a half-century of deep hostility.

Referendums are all the rage in Europe. In June, British voters will decide whether the United Kingdom should remain in the European Union.The Hungarian government has called for a referendum on accepting its quota of refugees set by the EU.

Alexis de Tocqueville, a liberal French aristocrat, visited the United States in 1831 ostensibly to write a study of its “enlightened” prison system (locking people up in solitary confinement like penitent monks was the latest modern idea).Out of this trip came de Tocqueville’s m

Ted Cruz, one of the Republican candidates for the US presidency, recently said that his solution to the turmoil in the Middle East would be to “carpet-bomb” Daesh and see if “sand can glow in the dark”.Donald Trump, the Republican front runner, promised to “bomb the s…t out of I

There are many roads to political disaster: greed, hubris, the charisma of the demagogue and, perhaps most dangerous of all, fear.When people panic, they can become hysterical, and hysteria often leads to mass violence.When politicians convince people that they are in a life-or-d