A new essay argues that America’s future will hinge largely on taking a very different turn to the one in which US foreign policy is headed, writes Edward Luce

The most curious thing about David Miliband's article for the latest New Statesman — which is causing quite a stir this morning — is that it should appear now. After all, the Roy Hattersley essay that it purports to be responding to was published, so far as I can tell, last September. That's five months ago. Which is fine, if it's really taken MiliMajor that long to get ...

2012 is a year of Dickens anniversaries — a major one for him, and what’s turned out to be quite a significant one for me. It’s his bicentenary, of course, but it will also be 30 years since I first read Bleak House. I know that because I wrote an essay on it in my first term at Oxford. Looking at that again, when I came upon it a few weeks ago, I experienced one of those

The Council has spoken, the votes have been cast, and the results are in for the first Watcher's Council match up of 2012, carved eternally in the akhasic records of cyberspace. This week's winning essay, The Mellow Jihadi's Lance Corporal Donald Hogan, Marine Hero is a prime example of the Jihadi's unique literary style as he takes a stirring look at an American hero in and re...

The Council has spoken, the votes have been cast, and the results are in for this week's Watcher's Council match up of 2012, carved eternally in the akhasic records of cyberspace. This week's winning essay, Joshuapundit's The Tale Of The Swine is a cautionary tale about...well I think you'll figure it out for yourselves. Here's a slice: Once there was a tribe of wild ...

The Council has spoken, the votes have been cast, and the results are in for the first Watcher's Council match up of 2012, carved eternally in the akhasic records of cyberspace. Great ideas and eternal truths never die - or as the megilla written by Ecclesiastes put it so well long ago "There is nothing new under the sun" - because human nature never changes. This week's winning essay, T...

Recommended: this long essay (pdf) on the selection process for next year's transfer of power at the top echelons of the CPC, and the factional interests and growing policy divides behind it. If you only read one thing on China...

ESSAY: When studies of infant feeding become ‘breast is best’ advocacy, it makes for bad research and bad policy.

ESSAY: Japan’s attack on the US 70 years ago was not a surprise but rather the culmination of imperial rivalry.

ESSAY: Scotland’s elite is trying to fashion a whole new identity built on anti-sectarianism.