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 ...

Over Christmas my father announced that he only really got the newspaper to see which of his friends had died that day. “There comes a stage when you move naturally from weddings to obituaries” he intoned and looked longingly at his mother-in-law. This shocked me not only because I had not yet finished my Bran Flakes, but because I’m already an avid obituary reader. In fact, obituaries are about the only thing that is getting me through the crippling self-doubt and depression associated with trying - and failing - to get gainful employment after university. There will be many of you reading this who will soon face similar worries. Be in no doubt that you are some of the lucky ones: at least you’ll have a degree from a good university. But many of you will have spent so much of your education keeping every possible door open that actually facing up manfully to a decision which will shut some may prove much harder than you imagine. Of course there are doctors and actors and thos ...

On Wednesdays for the next few months, polar bears and elephant seals will be visiting households up and down the country. Viewers of the BBC’s new natural history spectacular, Frozen Planet, will be turning their eyes towards the Polar Regions. And they will not be alone. In the last few years there are plenty who have been talking, worrying and pontificating about the future of our planet’s coldest places. The most heated debate centres on the Arctic Ocean. More than twelve books on the topic have appeared since 2009. Conferences, where suited bigwigs rub shoulders with their sealskin clad indigenous colleagues, have been mushrooming all over the place. At one not so long ago, I spilt coffee down Greenland’s deputy foreign minister’s rather fetching reindeer jacket. The Arctic, it seems, is back. People will probably already have a decent idea of the key debates. Warming in the earth’s northern reaches has caused dramatic environmental changes over the last twenty years. ...

Just occasionally, debris from the grand geopolitical or ideological tussles between the great and the good falls to earth and hits someone small. These are amazing and moving moments. Amazing because they remind us that although we are all too often preoccupied with the mundane, the practical and the everyday, we can still have great bearing; moving because they often bring a very personal tragedy into posterity’s view. History has many examples, but my favourite is an old Aztec story. It follows the Spanish conquistadors’ horrific siege of the empire’s great capital: Tenochtitlan. The shining city in the middle of the lake, connected all too precariously with the shores by long causeways, saw more than a month of mismatched urban warfare. During the bloody malaise, in which all the metallic and equine advantages of the Spanish were put to use, Cuauhtemoc (then just 18) acceded to the Aztec throne. His uncle Montezuma had died months before, and Cuauhtemoc was the last in a fr ...

The town of Blagoveshchensk has more charm than others in the Russian Far East. Rugby Union is not as big here as in Krasnoyarsk. Nor does it have a Lenin head on anything the same scale as Ulan Ude (seven metres high). But it has one thing which is putting it firmly on the map – China. Across from the Mayor’s office lies 750 metres of river water and then Heihe, a Chinese border town that has doubled in size over the last few years on Russian tourist trade. No bridge connects the two border cities. To get across you board a ferry after negotiating customs. When a bridge project was first mooted in 1993 the Russians vetoed it. The worry was that it would simply encourage China’s annexation of the region. Borders are odd places. Currently around 30% of them are contested worldwide. They come in all shapes and sizes. Some are passive and permeable, mere signs on the roadside. Others are obvious and dangerous demarcations. Among the oddest is the Russian-Chinese border, which ...

In the current political malaise, the story about how the public hate their politicians is as tired as the rhetoric being used to fight the election. Sanctimonious commentators, journalists and public figures are all out to wring as many column inches as possible out of our sorry and sopping political class. “They are all crooks,” we hear. “They’ve misspent all our taxes and I’m disinclined to give them any more,” they holler. MPs are woefully out of touch and out only for themselves it seems. The duck house has become the new ivory tower. The attraction of such arguments is that they are easy. In a sense they absolve all of us from bothering to look at the thorny issues that face a Britain on the slide. Like toddlers who take refuge under the table in a storm, we can duck the complicated jargon of the deficit by suggesting that most of the people in the know are probably lying anyway. Such arguments are the electorate’s blankey – a reassuring friend in the unknown and ...

There is a popular argument that exploration is dead. Livingstone, Scott, Amundsen, Peary and Bingham have, so the theory goes, got there first. There is nowhere left to discover, no blank spaces left on the map to fill in. But people who believe such things have rarely heard the story of Nanda Devi. Half-imagined and half-created, it is one of the last unknowns.Nanda Devi is among the world’s highest mountains. Rising 25,640 feet above the already mountainous Sikkim landscape it sits on the border between Tibet and India. Visible from the summer colonial capital of Darjeeling, the peak was long believed to be the British Empire’s tallest. For Hindus it has special significance as one of the 5 sources of the Ganges. Standing solemn and distant the mountain has, since the 1880s, been the subject of constant speculation and mystery. For many it is the true location of Shangri-La. Surrounded by numerous Himalayan peaks, 12 of which exceed 21,000 feet, no human had even made it to th ...

‘Energy security’ is both a popular and a misleading phrase. It implies a defensive and hostile environment in which countries compete tooth and nail for the earth’s dwindling resources. But in reality the global energy infrastructure is founded on close political and economic ties based on agreements both with the oil and gas producers but also between fellow consumers. It is a delicate balance, and one that is periodically upset by pipeline disputes. The most recent one between Ukraine and Russia resulted in the closure of a vital pipeline leaving thousands across Europe and Turkey without heat or electricity. For a brief moment at least, some of Europe’s major powers became aware of a complete reliance on their impoverished neighbours for their energy supply. The question then for Europe’s richest states is how best to avoid a repeat performance. Policy responses have varied greatly. Germany has agreed a controversial new pipeline, Nordstream, which links Siberian gas res ...

Places, it seems, consist of more than just houses, roads and people. They owe much of their identity to the collective imagination, to references and depictions in literature and quirks of history. These intertwine to give a geographical location ‘character’. Oxford is a great example of this process. Darling of artists, writers and politicians, the city and, more specifically, the University have long held a special position in the British psyche. It is a place suffused with a strange mythology. For the world looking in on this bubble, it remains heavily steeped in the rhetoric, imagery and narratives of the pre-war, ‘Brideshead’ era. Waugh and his contemporaries have caricatured a city. It is stuck in their world.Students and dons alike recognise the shortcomings of this portrayal. College prospectuses are at pains to portray the University as multiethnic, diverse and modern. Things have, they stress, changed since those Edwardian days of innocence and frivolity. But despit ...