Why is the Strait of Hormuz important?
Much of the world’s fuel travels through a waterway 20 miles wide at its narrowest point: The Strait of Hormuz....
politics
A neglected land
(Written December 2025) I stood facing the United Nations Buffer Zone in Nicosia, watching the cats pass through the designated...
The world’s forgotten wars: Myanmar
With the war in Ukraine, Iran, Lebanon and Gaza, alongside US military operations in Venezuela and new cartel crackdowns in...
Femi Kuti and the Positive Force Bring the Best of Afrobeat to Leeds
Wave after wave of Afro-groove crashed down upon the crowd: it was impossible to stay still, impossible to keep from...
Welcome to the age of Killer Robots
Stanley Kubrick's cult classic 2001: A Space Odyssey prophetically warned of autonomous robots through the unsettling computer system HAL 9000....
What if Yuri Gagarin had never gone to space?
12 April marks 65 years since Soviet cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, became the first human to voyage into outer space. His...
You are what you eat: What a rise in skinny culture reveals about the Western political climate
What has become increasingly more noticeable in the media is the frequency of celebrities and influencers flaunting how skinny they...
Musings on the growth of American radical right-wing political culture
When Trump won in 2016 many commentators, politicians and ordinary people thought that America was experiencing its peak populist moment,...
Three years of chaos in the Middle East
When I started my degree in Middle Eastern Studies, the region seemed to be relatively calm, the 2010s had been...
Climate change isn’t going away – you’re not the reason why
Much discourse surrounding the climate emergency revolves around carbon footprints and the individual doing their bit to reduce the overwhelming...