Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Late in this book of biographical essays, David Runciman discusses how Barack Obama took consolation from the ...

David Runciman’s The Handover waves off ideas of killer robots, and argues that states and corporations were the smart machines of their era A bold voice on geopolitics and economics, Sherelle ...

The Mont Pelerin Society was set up in 1947 with the aim of ensuring that the apparent triumph of freedom over fascism in the Second World War should instead be understood as a defeat. Inspired by its ...

Barely three months away from the election it is impossible to say who is likely to win: it could be either of the main parties, or it could be neither. Plenty of past elections have been too close to ...

One of the better arguments for Britain’s leaving the EU was that it might reinvigorate and liberate national politics, stifled for too long by the absence of real choice at election time. The EU is a ...

For the first episode in the new series of History of Ideas – on the great essays and the great essayists – David discusses Montaigne, the man who invented a whole new way of writing... For the second ...

Getting through Brexit successfully will probably require a certain amount of insouciance. As so often in politics, the roles seem to have been handed out the wrong way round. May would have been a ...

When the Australian cricketers Steve Smith, David Warner and Cameron Bancroft were exposed tampering with the ball during last year’s test series in South Africa there was, along with all the faux ...

For the second episode in this season of History of Ideas, David discusses the Scottish philosopher David Hume and explores how eighteenth-century arguments about the national debt can help make sense ...