It could have been epic; it could have been huge. As the Tories launched their manifesto at Battersea Power Station this week, they rounded up a handful of their work experience girls and gopher boys to stand outside and hold aloft a great banner bearing the words “We’re All In This Together”, all for the benefit of the cameramen flying over the venue in the network helicopters. Inside, David Cameron invoked Kennedy’s line about asking what you can do for your country, whilst all around the keyword of the day was “Change”. We use words like “crisis” or “genius” or “legendary” so much that they begin to lose their meaning, and it becomes all the more difficult to realise when we are presented with the real deal. The same is true of the word “revolution”. The Conservative Party – whether out of earnest idealism, or a desperate attempt to throw together all the interesting ideas that have come out of the right-wing think tanks over the last decade in order t ...

Nearly a century and a half has passed since an extraordinary yet iconic meeting of minds took place at the Oxford University Museum. In June 1860 a range of renowned British scientists and philosophers gathered for a public discussion centred on the findings of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species . It is said that during the debate Anglican leader Bishop Wilberforce asked Darwin’s advocate Thomas Henry Huxley whether it was through his grandmother or his grandfather that he claimed descent from a monkey; Huxley allegedly responded by declaring he would rather be descended from a monkey than hold any connection to a man who used his intellect to obscure the truth. If we were to hold a rematch and bring the debate about the meaning of scripture, the value of religious faith, the very existence of God, then what would the scene look like? When evangelical atheists like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens take to the pulpit – only to be shouted down in turn by Bible-bashing ...

At the very beginning of the twentieth century, Beijing was a cosmopolitan city where the presence of foreign power was keenly felt by its denizens. The Legation Quarter of the Forbidden City was carved up like a cake between the world’s foremost imperial superpowers. The French possessed the old palaces of an impoverished Manchu noble, close to a French school and their own church of St Michel. The building which now houses the People’s Supreme Procuracy was once home to a Russian embassy. The city’s Communist Party headquarters today were then the base of the Japanese Legation. The British, meanwhile, resided in a palace they rented from an imperial prince.Foreign influences were as visible then in Beijing as they are today at a time when visitors to Tiananmen Square will see the familiar red-and-yellow McDonald’s sign towering over them like the Stars and Stripes, and where – until it was recently shut down after protests – you could find a Starbucks in the Forbidden ...

I was sat in a bar in the commercial district of Beijing last Sunday night, keeping an eye on England’s progress on the final day of the Ashes on one television screen whilst watching Chelsea play Fulham on the other. The staff at the bar are all Chinese, but it is popular with expats, serving bangers and mash, pizzas, and draught beer, with live sport feeds always on the screens. It was one of those splendid yet ever so slightly surreal coincidences that led me that night to meet a middle-aged businessman in China who just so happened to have been an old boy from my very own Leeds Grammar School. We spent much of the evening talking amiably about all manner of things, the knot of an old school tie evidently tighter than the bonds we all naturally share as human beings. But on a night like that, the sport kept on drawing our eyes back. He was a rugby man, and told me he’d played in the first XV at school. At this particular bar, they had turned up the volume on the football and m ...