It's been over a month and a half. Italy is still a solitary lost boot floating in the Mediterranean, with no clear premier, ruling party, or future, for the first time in the Republic's history. When a similar stall happened in the UK, it was very Shakespearean: there was an unlikely love story between irreconcilably warring factions, a lot of the juicy action happened offstage, and it all ended tragically in a tryst in a rose garden. Fittingly, Italy's intermezzo has been more operatic. Courtesans and foreign influence caused the fall of the previous leader, and now the good and noble people of Italy, long repressed by his rule, await the outcome of the final, set-piece battle between the old Duke, his cigar-chomping supposed successor, and the loveable court jester who suddenly appeared from behind an armoire in Act 3. This harlequin is Beppe Grillo, the now-infamous comedian and leader of the Five Star Movement (M5S), a political party which he began, but to which his own rule ...

In the summer of 1856 the dashing British diplomat Lord Dufferin, accompanied by his longsuffering butler ‘Wilson’, joined a French cruise to the Arctic led by Napoleon III. Despite wooing Nordic girls in Latin and organising can-can dances aboard ship, the Europeans were warmly received in northern climes. By contrast, today’s European diplomats seem to be getting a chillier reception beyond the 66th parallel. The Arctic is currently governed by a set of piecemeal agreements between the ‘Arctic Five’ - those states that have Arctic Ocean coastline (Russia, America, Canada, Norway and Denmark, of which Greenland is a part). Much of the negotiation happens bi-laterally or in specialist forums like the Arctic Council. Initially created to provide information for policy makers, the latter involves a wider range of Arctic players including Sweden, Finland and Iceland. Representatives from the region’s many indigenous groups are permanent members. Six non-Arctic states and a nu ...

- “Do you not realise that you too could create all these things in a sense?" - “And what sense is that?” he said. - “It’s not difficult,” I said. “You could do it anywhere you like and as quickly as you like – quickest, I suppose, if you took a looking-glass and held it up all around you. You could make the sun in an instant, and everything in the sky; the earth in an instant, yourself in an instant, and all the other animals and tools and plants and all the other things we were just talking about.” - “Oh, sure,” he said, “as they appear – but not as they really are.” Plato, Republic X 596d-e The best insults come back as banners. “Tory” originally meant outlaw or rebel – coined from the Irish word for “pursue” – until it became a badge of honour for the Royalist faction in Parliament under Charles II. The “Impressionist” movement took its name from a sneer by the art critic and satirist Louis Leroy, who lambasted Monet’s Impre ...

"It is no secret that Tories in the south want to leave Scotland in darkness, but fixing the clocks to British summertime would mean that dawn wouldn't break until nearly 9am." With all of the sardonic candour that only an opposition politician could muster, SNP MP Angus MacNeil public denounces David Cameron's support for moving the clocks forward by an hour in order to align with Central European Time. And many, many people agree with him.The announcement that the government has backed a bid for the UK to move its clocks forward for a three year trial period has been met with dissenting voices, especially from the devolved powers. With these doubts ringing in Parliament's ears, Cameron has backed the plan with Business Secretary Edward Davey stating that, "as the prime minister has made clear, we would need consensus from the devolved administrations if any change were to take place". So what's all the fuss about? The pro-time change lobby tell of the practica ...

One year after the popular Egyptian uprising that overthrew Hosni Mubarak, Twitter has announced that it will permit country-specific censorship of content that violates regional laws. Censored tweets would be greyed out and replaced with the words ‘This tweet from @username has been withheld in: Country’. As protests spread from Egypt in 2011, Twitter’s micro-blogging service became an important platform for protesters to air views, coordinate action plans and celebrate victory in a quick and globally accessible way. So powerful was the impact that when the London riots began, many cited Twitter for fuelling the fire, and called for the network to shut. Twitter was not just an agent of these uprisings. In its famous blog post a year ago, ‘The Tweets Must Flow’, Twitter officials appeared convinced that their service served an important global function: Our goal is to instantly connect people everywhere to what is most meaningful to them. For this to happen, freedom of ...

“When all the world is mad,” the great G. H. Hardy once opined, “a mathematician may find in mathematics an incomparable anodyne.” If he’s right – and he usually was – now is probably one of those rare moments when you should envy the college mathematicians. The latest round of climate talks has collapsed into what can only be described as paroxysms of indecision, a messy, convulsive end to a Kafkaesque farce of lacklustre delegates and bizarre intergovernmental pranks. Cabals issuing cynical fake documents, intimate ministerial “huddles to save the world”, and high-profile threats to walk out left the conference in Durban looking more like a hideous soap-opera than a measured, progressive discussion. As one impassioned commentator chillingly remarked, “it’s a disastrous, profoundly distressing outcome” . Citizens of Earth, tremble in your socks. In a strange way, the one constructive element of Durban 2011 is also its most appalling. Oddly, we do now have a ...

One reads the headline in the morning’s Telegraph with that familiar crushing feeling: ‘Oxford Tories’ nights of port and Nazi songs’. A gruesome illustrated litany follows, listing the less wholesome doings of members of the Oxford University Conservative Association. The Telegraph , whose known editorial politics make the article unlikely to be motivated by party political considerations, indicts OUCA on the counts of "anti-Semitism, debauchery and snobbery". The Telegraph ’s online edition confirms that it is not déjà vu one is feeling. We are invited to click on ‘Related Links’ to articles headlined ‘Oxford student Tories in racism row’ (June 2009), and, with comic predictability, ‘Oxford student Tories in sexism row’ (June 2010). Perhaps one is being too charitable, but it is difficult to believe that OUCA is an unequivocally or even predominantly racist (sexist, elitist, anti-Semitic...) institution. That its officers have been sufficiently ...

To outsiders the world of the English boarding school can occasionally seem incomprehensibly foreign: the esoteric slang, the strangely archaic routines and the flamboyantly Edwardian dress codes tending to elicit amusement and derision in equal measure. These things can be, and generally are, seen as essentially harmless. They are throwbacks to bygone eras, of interest only to the eccentric antiquarian seduced by these pockets of Victorian idiosyncrasy which Britain has managed to preserve over the years with little but an occasional swipe from an embittered Guardian columnist. The cream of English boarding schools live on in their quirky outdated grandeur across the country, keeping themselves to themselves and their peculiar rituals intact. Scattered across the English countryside, self-sufficient and withdrawn into themselves like monasteries, each one is an island. Even exceptions like Harrow, which has now been swallowed by the relentless march of London’s urban sprawl, stil ...

I’m meeting 19 year old author Ben Brooks to talk about his most recent novel Grow Up . He’s pretty camera- and interview-shy it seems, preferring to promote himself through interviews with publications like web-based lit-journal HTMLGIANT. All I know of Brooks in the flesh is that he’s ‘a heartthrob’ ( Dazed and Confused ) and ‘has a killer fringe’ ( Don’t Panic ). I’m also told he’s “fucking righteous” ( HTMLG ) When he arrives he’s quiet. He has an intricate tattoo of a rose on his right bicep, half obscured by a the sleeve of a denim jacket. His fringe is confirmed as totally killer. For the last week I’ve been reading and re-reading Grow Up in prep. I can’t help but compliment him on various lines that have gotten stuck in my head. The new best description of a hangover ever: “I have built a train-wreck in my head from cheap wine and horrible sex”.The book that Brooks says started him writing came out of the American scene; The Human W ...

On the 1st of June, an article appeared on the website Gawker with the intriguing headline ‘The Underground Website Where You Can Buy Any Drug Imaginable’. It is an interesting article, and yes, you still can buy a whole host of illegal products from the site . However, the article’s significance to the world lay not in its exposition of this shady eBay knockoff, but in its explanation of one of the underlying anonymising technologies being employed: Bitcoins. What are Bitcoins? An explanation is offered in this video by its proponents: In other words, Bitcoins are a digital currency, virtual tokens. They were dreamt up in December 2009 by a cryptographer under the probable pseudonym ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ who has now vanished from the scene. Put simply, their value – like the U.S Dollar following its exit from the gold standard – is not ‘backed up’ by any tangible assets, but is instead derived from ‘faith’. By faith, I mean a collective belief that Bitcoins ...

AQA recently announced a scheme to rank all A-level students according to which school they attend, aimed at exposing potential in students from underachieving schools. Or, to put it another way, AQA have today announced a scheme to penalise students from independent schools. Under the system, students from low-performing comprehensives in disadvantaged areas would be entitled to A-level ‘bonus points’ for their school’s ranking, whereas a student from a top performing independent with no students on free school meals would be penalised for the average success of their school. In theory, the scheme sounds promising; a leveling of potential regardless of achievement. In practice attributing bonus points for underperforming schools and penalty points for top ones is fraught with danger. As Professor Alan Smithers from the University of Buckingham has stated, “There must be concerns about the ranking the candidates are awarded. The possibility for errors are enormous.” The ...

“Nobody knows all the wounds of our national tragedy... This trouble will drive us mad” These words of Gomidas in his final moments of lucidity are chillingly prophetic. Perhaps the original tortured artist, his pithy and disarmingly titled songs, such as I Cannot Dance and Oh, What a Delight echo the wry melancholy of The Smiths more than a peasant folk tradition of almost a century earlier. Yet both irony and incongruity were so poignant in the life and works of this Armenian priest and musician - or, to give him his lofty official title, ‘doctor of musicology’.He wrenched the remnants of Armenian peasant culture into the 20th century, painstakingly putting rural folk songs he came across to manuscript paper. His aim was to resurrect the cultural heritage of his homeland. Yet this was not a self-promoting scheme reminiscent of patronising narodniks attempting to incite passion in indifferent Russian serfs. It was an entirely selfless, and ultimately masochistic, task, ...

Indians are a very religious lot. I should know that, as I am one of them. Religion is an integral part of everyday life and influences all the decisions that you make, from your days in the cradle to the time you enter the grave. Charity is an important part of that religious identity and plays a significant role in helping those living below the poverty line. For example, many temples, mosques and gurudwaras offer free food to all that come to their doorstep. I once believed that charity from religious institutions was a more efficient way to help the economically vulnerable than government-run schemes where most of the money was lost to corruption. But recent events in relation to the huge treasure trove found at Sree Padmanabhaswamy temple (Kerala) have presented me with a dilemma. The Sree Padmanabhaswamy temple, founded in the 6th century A.D., has long been a place of worship for the followers of Lord Vishnu. The administration of the temple was taken over by the local king o ...