A confession. I have a little problem, one that is absorbing much thought and time as I grapple with it; one that risks alienating some of my friends, vindicating some of my enemies, and embarrassing myself. Therefore, in true Noughties style, I shall reveal it to the open forum of the Internet: I have a sneaking affection and sympathy for Gordon Brown. Neither his policies, nor political bedfellows serve to attract; nor too the dispiriting spectacle of a government mired in enervating scandal and purposeless drift, sitting atop a weakened political system that increasingly seems run by and for the crooks within it. It is not Labour that attracts me; indeed the party might almost be doing itself a favour were it to limp quietly off into the political sunset. It is a party that has presided over economic disaster and unnecessary war, whose time in office has seen a complete collapse of public faith in politics and politicians, whose main legacy in the popular imagination may well be t ...

It remains one of the most famous pictures of the past 20 years, an emotive and potent symbol of resistance to oppression; that image of a solitary and unarmed man confronting a line of tanks rolling down Tiananmen Square. Yet for all power of the image it is unknown by many in China; the Tiananmen protests remain a non-event in official government accounts, and it intends on keeping it that way. In conversation over Skype with a friend in China, he told me of how entire sites such as Twitter had been blocked by the government; the better to maintain, on the 20th anniversary of the protests, the widespread ignorance within China of what happened. Such measures are of course typical of repressive states; no autocratic administration relishes the opportunity to remember the rebellions of the past, or publicise those of the present. Though we in the west are all too familiar with the images of that day, within China they are heavily censored, and go unmentioned in school textbooks; histor ...

Few protested the visit of Paul Kagame to the Oxford Union. His was a calm, ordinary address, delivered to a calm, ordinary crowd. Seemingly unenlivened by any spark of controversy, it failed to draw in the baying and inebriated mass of 2007’s "Free Speech Forum", the day a discussion between a pathetic and discredited ex-academic, a couple of Lib Dem MPs and an unimaginative bigot managed to unite the national press, a large crowd of excited protesters and the redoubtable George Galloway in condemnation of the event, the society, its moral values, and the perceived poor judgement of its officers. Nowhere was there to be seen Oxford’s self-professed student radicals, its civil rights campaigners, or even the merely curious and bored who had so swelled the dissenting ranks of that notable occasion; nowhere to be seen the fervent student-led human rights agitation of the innumerable protests and sit-ins staged against Israeli activity in Gaza, or against Balliol’s choi ...

The contemporary green movement carries with it all the weight of modern scientism; shrieking headlines and bold calls toward sweeping changes in our society are backed up by reference to graphs, computer-generated models, glacier core analysis in Greenland, changing weather patterns, and the intricacies of carbon emissions. Technical phrases such as the ‘ice albedo effect’ or ‘thermohaline circulation’ serve to confer a certain irrefutability onto green arguments, especially when brought forward into public discourse; challenge the argument, it implies, and you challenge the legitimacy of science itself, and hence the very basis of human progress. Yet for all the possible rights and wrongs of such an association (and the profound theoretical problems incurred by considering scientific evidence and consensus to be unworthy of challenge), it remains that the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and countless studies, surveys and papers are only one part ...

''States wax and wane; empires cleave asunder and coalesce''. Such are the opening words of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms , one of China's great literary classics. Set amidst the dying days of the Han dynasty, it has spawned innumerable films, adaptations, and appreciations, all of which centre around one key idea – the inevitable passing of the Mandate of Heaven, the heavenly right to rule, from one ruler to the next. Between ancient China and the modern west lies a great chasm of time, geography and knowledge; yet in both the portentous power of the first sentence and the picture of moral, physical and spiritual corruption depicted throughout the book, one can indeed see striking similarities between the writer Luo Guanzhong, and the doom-sayers of our day. From the dire, quasi-mystical warnings of Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West (published 1918), to more recent predictions of imminent economic catastrophe, to the still more recurrent narrative of approaching we ...