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 ...

A strange sound has been echoing through the streets of the Arab world’s capitals of late. It is the awful chinking of a handful of coins being shaken in a begging bowl the size of a nation. Delegations from Egypt, the largest Arab country and the supreme petri dish of political Islam in the wake of the Arab Spring, have been touring their neighbours’ finance ministries furiously in an increasingly desperate appeal for loans.First they canvassed the obvious candidates. Qatar, the Armani-suited uncle with the unsmiling eyes, proved obliging at first, lending $2.5 billion in December. Egypt promptly spent this with unhealthy alacrity and went back for more. It did not meet with much sympathy (STOP PRESS: Qatar has since announced an emergency loan of $3 billion, either in the form of treasury bonds or bank deposits). When Doha dried up, Egypt turned to less likely sources. Flush with hydrocarbon dollars and reeling from the news that its GDP has more than doubled in the last y ...

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 ...

Politics has often obscured economics in the raucous debate on tuition fees, perhaps rightly so given the plausible case that to model education as a good at all is a flawed approach to the issue. But if opponents of the increase wanted to fight fire with fire the field of information economics provides an argument that undermines a major part of the coalition’s case. The argument is an application of a classic paper by Michael Spence, in which he investigates the role of signalling in alleviating the problems resulting from asymmetric information in the labour market. Spence’s model has two types of workers – Alphas and Betas – and Alphas have a much higher productivity. Workers know their type but firms can’t tell. The result is that the real wage is simply set at the average productivity. Now suppose workers are given the option of going to university, and that Alphas will get a degree if they attend but Betas will fail. Alphas can signal their type to firms with a degre ...

In the past week the headlines have looked like the stuff of fairy tales: Cinderella has got her Prince, and the bad guy is dead. Am I the only one who’s uneasy about this? The reaction to Bin Laden’s assassination has been terrifying. Thousands of people gathered outside the White House with face paint and flags chanting “USA! USA!”: you’d be forgiven for thinking it was July 4th. It’s cathartic, sure. It’s been a long time coming. Bin Laden’s evasiveness over the past decade has come to symbolise the many failings of the War on Terror, but I struggle to see how such an overt celebration of an individual’s death will do America any favours. The failure of Al Qaeda –and indeed, any extremist Islamic group – to gain footholds in the ongoing revolutionary movements across the Middle East was an indication that their influence was fading. Al Qaeda's mission is to create a new world caliphate but the region's people are dying for democracy.This martyrdom, coupl ...

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 ...