For a few brief moments on Sunday 22 January it was as though Boris Johnson was the British prime minister again. He strode through central Kyiv, quilted jacket flapping, tie askew, to greet the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky. As the waiting camera crew filmed, Johnson promised to be “a foot soldier, a spear carrier”, in the effort to help Ukraine. He assured Zelensky, “I will do whatever I can.” Yet even as Johnson was playing the statesman in Kyiv he was enmeshed in fresh scandal at home, and the memories of how his inglorious reign ended last July came flooding back. The specific allegations, this time, first reported by the Sunday Times, were that Richard Sharp, chairman of the BBC, had helped ...

There was a period when it seemed like Anas Sarwar was a knight coming over the hill on his charger, a Sir Lancelot who would gallop into the melee and scatter Nats around the battlefield. That was certainly what he intended to be. Increasingly, though, he risks resembling only another Scottish Labour Don Quixote, his lance dipped in confusion, unclear what he wishes were true and what is true – the latest party leader “born to be an example of misfortune, and a target at which the arrows of adversary are aimed”. It’s an understatement to say that Sarwar’s handling of the controversial Gender Recognition Reform bill has left a great deal to be desired. Before the bill was passed, I spoke to ...

I can’t remember the last time a movie divided opinion as Tár has. When I saw it – at the Barbican, in the City of London, where audiences tend to be on the committed side – a couple in the row behind me noisily walked out after an hour. On social media, men insist Todd Field’s award-winning film – about the fall of a renowned composer and conductor, Lydia Tár, played by Cate Blanchett – is just so much pretentious, culture war dross; in the New York Review of Books, Zadie Smith’s awestruck scene-by-scene anatomisation runs to thousands of words and comes with footnotes. Does Tár set back the cause of women in classical music? Marin Alsop, the American conductor, believes that it does. ...

The Daily Mail is outraged that half of all households get more back from the government than they pay in tax. We've become a "something for nothing" country, says today's front page (23 January) – a headline calculated to make steam come out of the ears of everyone who earns more than £62,000. Dismantle the editorial artifice, however, and the real picture is of vast inequality, tax evasion on an epic scale and the erosion of most channels of redistributing wealth. The Mail story relies on three entirely different facts. First, that half of all income tax is paid by the top 10 per cent of earners. Second, that in addition to cash benefits poorer households are estimated to receive “benefits in ...

During his decade in power to date, Xi Jinping has established a ritual of conducting an annual inspection tour before the Lunar New Year to show off his credentials as a man of the people. State media outlets run adoring coverage of the Chinese leader’s visits to humble family homes to share home-cooked dumplings and marvel at how living conditions have improved under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s rule. In 2014, Xi was lauded for “braving the cold” of Inner Mongolia to learn about the lives of forestry workers, while three years later, he called in at the home of an “impoverished villager” in Hebei province to help him “sort out his household budget”. You get the idea. The new year ...

Last month a supposedly over-hyped ingenue author – a producer, many say, of glorified chick-lit – published a brilliantly nuanced essay in the Paris Review, casting an erudite eye over the history of the novel and drawing a provocative comparison between two of its giants, Austen and Joyce. How could one writer be both things: an unschooled, unskilled peddler of commercial pap, and a superb critic? I’m talking, of course, about the author everyone talks about all the time: Sally Rooney. Doubleness is a theme of Rooney’s career: she is a darling of publishing, our time’s bestselling literary author – as well as the most patronised and reviled. People queued up to buy her latest novel from pop-up shops and converted ice cream vans, ...

Watching Andy Murray at the Australian Open – his epic second-round match on 19 January lasted nearly six hours and finished at 4.05am – I was reminded of a story the novelist Tim Pears once told me about the American tennis player Jimmy Connors. At the age of 39, Connors, having refused to retire, was struggling at the 1991 US Open against a much younger opponent and heading for certain defeat. And yet, Connors somehow prevailed in a gruelling five-set match. “Are you crazy?” Ilie Năstase asked an exhausted Connors afterwards as he was on a drip and in the urgent care of doctors. “What's wrong with you, you've won this tournament five times. Now you're old, you want to ...

BERLIN – Olaf Scholz really, really does not want to send Ukraine battle tanks. That is the essence of Germany’s policy on arms exports, once you prune back the limp excuses. One of the more recent ones was for Berlin to insist that it would only send its Leopard 2 tanks, or approve their export by European partners such as Poland, if the US sent tanks of its own. A new excuse dropped earlier today (20 January) at the summit of Kyiv’s allies at the American air force base in Ramstein, in western Germany. Boris Pistorius, Scholz’s new defence minister, told reporters that no decision had been made on sending the Leopards but that the government would begin cataloguing its stocks ...