Engelsberg ideas

The New START treaty – enforced since 2011 and the last remaining arms‑control agreement between the United States and Russia – expired in February 2026 with nothing to replace it. The final legal barrier limiting the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals ...

At dawn on 3 October 2009, Camp Keating, a vulnerably exposed US Army outpost in Afghanistan’s Nuristan Province, within the Hindu Kush mountain range, came under sustained attack from Taliban fighters. The brutal, close-contact figh...

On 11 June, the conflagration in Ukraine was recorded as having lasted for 1,569 days. That is longer than the First World War, the 1861-65 American Civil War, and the Soviet Union’s 1941-45 Great Patriotic War against

Rigby’s Encyclopaedia of the Herring: Adventures with the King of Fishes, Graeme Rigby, Hurst, £25

Not many encyclopedias have a hero. This one does: the Atlantic herring, Clupea harengus, which makes the longest migrations of all its brethren, touching on many histories, many shores. To some it is ‘king of the fishes’. But it has other names, too. For ...

In the summer of 1895, at the new Queen’s Hall in London’s West End, Sir Henry Wood conducted the first-ever ‘Promenade Concert’. Today, the BBC Proms continue to thrive and over the years it’s been joined by a plethora of other classical music festivals. People, it turns out, like the music, and they also like the fact that they can spend their holidays pursuing a sustained ...