Opinion

As former president Nicola Sarkozy is sentenced to house arrest for illegal campaign financing, JOHN KAMPFNER wonders why French politics seems so susceptible to financial scandal.

There are different kinds of anger - some good and some bad. The right kind of anger can be valuable.

Boris Johnson gives reality cold shrift as Britain enters its Brexit Winter of Discontent.

The surviving Conservative Remainers have had little choice but to back some sort of Brexit, but their complete silence on the issue is shaming.

Bonnie Greer likens the governor of Florida to Michael Gove - both highly educated men, and both ushering in the Age of Stupid.

WILL SELF on reality TV programmes that are so bad, they're good

Far right talk show host Eric Zemmour, a big defender of Maurice Papon, may yet play a decisive role in France's presidential elections, underlining just how much the tensions of the past still play out today.

A minor change to the spelling of the Belarusian president's name would offer a subtle challenge to his authority.

It has had one of the highest Covid rates in the world – far in excess of other parts of the UK and the neighbouring Republic. So what is going on in Northern Ireland?

Singapore's island state has a well-earned reputation for law and order. But that doesn’t mean you won’t find vice there. 

Two writers with strikingly different reputations, whose long-lost work has recently been unearthed.

Three decades ago, dulcet tones from Estonia signalled the country's newfound freedom, writes SOPHIA DEBOICK

Real Madrid remains focal to European football. Florentino Pérez, Real Madrid president, is both responsible for this and has hindered it

PETER BARRON on a night spent at a monastery, where he met one of Spain’s most revered figures

On his centenary, Germany’s best-known post-war artist remains as influential – and contentious – as ever.

Fancy a trip to the continent now the pandemic is easing? JOHN RAIN looks back at some exotic European locations James Bond has been to, and who he killed there

From the BBC downwards, the UK media is consistently failing in its reporting of this government.

Will EU truck drivers see through Boris Johnson and Priti Patel's plan to allow them back into the country for just three months?

The country's curious election has changed everything.. we just have to wait to see how it has changed.

England’s higher education sector is supposed to be a success story. So why does it feel like it is in such disarray?

NIGEL WARBURTON, one of the world’s most-read philosophers, considers the latest art installation at Paris’s Arc de Triomphe.

After a dismal decade for centre left parties on the continent, there are now some positive signs tempered by a widespread failure to connect with voters. 

Regardless of its merits, the cack-handed handling of the defence deal between the US, UK and Australia risks handing the initiative to China and Russia.

Sunshine, super-riches... and sleaze. Monaco sits like a melanoma on the Med, a city state throwback autocracy where anything goes - except the payment of taxes. Now the glamour that has always masked the iniquity is overshadowed by a Prince whose personal life is again coming under uncomfortable scrutiny.

Prince Albert is not only the prince of Monaco but something akin to its general manager. So when his private life comes under the spotlight, so too does his principality.

In a vote on the governor’s leadership through the pandemic, voters resoundingly rejected replacing him with a Trumpist Republican.

MATT KELLY on how the West triumphed over the Soviets in a campaign fought in the aisles and check-outs.

The tech firm’s sale was supposed to demonstrate confidence in a post-Brexit UK. But it hasn’t worked out like that.

The pandemic produced apocalyptic warnings about higher education in the UK. In fact, its future is looking a lot brighter than predicted.

Comedian MITCH BENN proposes new names for the ministries serving Boris Johnson's government.

WILL SELF on the reggae culture and music from his youth, and finding it in Cornwall.

She lived in an extraordinary time, among some of the most colossal figures of 20th Century Europe. But, Juliette Gréco outlived them all - and did so on her own terms.