Nigeria’s president is locked in a fierce reelection battle — one that is not just playing out among voters ahead of January polls, but pitting teams of lawyers and lobbyists against a lone litigant half a world away in California. Remarkably, this latter-day David just won a significant victory over Goliath.
In his memoir The Lion Awakes, Ashish Thakkar recounts how, as a young entrepreneur flogging computer parts across Africa in the 1990s, he noticed that flights within the continent took suspiciously longer than the maps suggested. Were the planes slower? No. The Mercator projection had been quietly shrinking Africa for centuries, the cartographic equivalent of …
The UK says it welcomes tourists, artists, writers and performers. Its visitor visa system sometimes seems determined to prove otherwise. There is something wonderfully British about telling the world that Britain is open for business, culture and tourism, while simultaneously asking an African musician why somebody deposited £500 into his bank account three weeks before …
What’s a country that’s at the top of your bucket list? Watched and loved Love in Tokyo
From the moment Sean Connery first uttered “Bond, James Bond” in *Dr. No*, right through Daniel Craig’s final, rather damp exit in *No Time to Die*, I, like millions of other loyal subjects, laboured under a charming delusion. I believed the United Kingdom possessed impregnable security. MI5, MI6, the whole alphabet soup of spooks with licences to kill, gadgets that could turn a fountain pen into a nuclear deterrent, and a national instinct for spotting a wrong ’un at fifty paces. We had the Queen, the navy, and 007.
