Counterpoints

As Georgia licks its wounds, a morally dubious industry has sprung up to churn out books celebrating the end of American global hegemony

By opening its columns to Islamist apologists, Prospect magazine is undermining moderate Muslims

The EU’s Human Rights Act need not be incompatible with parliamentary sovereignty – if the government were to grow a backbone

Russian attitudes to sexual harassment may shock us now, but it wasn’t that long ago that customs here were not so very different

The verb “pop” comes from the nursery, and its purpose is to put us back there

The public and the private are always swirling around, in a fluid, ever-changing relationship

The Patisserie Wars are expanding at least as rapidly as the nation’s waistbands

In the dictionary on my laptop it defines art as “the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination”. To me, that’s cooking

Mastering facts, memorising rules, learning poems by heart have come to be regarded, not as enlarging a child’s world but as positively crushing his or her spirit

No doubt the haka is all very well in its time and place – but that place was long ago and far away. It’s essentially a cannibal war dance designed to scare the living daylights out of those you hope to kill and eat