Throughout the 1960s, the tobacco industry famously spent millions promoting a small group of vociferous "sceptics" who, in the face of overwhelming evidence, continued to deny the link between smoking and cancer. The strategy paid off. Long after a clear scientific consensus had emerged, much of the public still believed that the case remained unproven.

In a sceptical age, even those disseminating wholly bogus ideas - from corporate pseudo-science to [...]

Last month, the sporting world gave a collective sigh of relief that the Beijing Olympics had passed without any major cheating scandals. But the dissenting voices were not completely silenced: some claimed Michael Phelps's Nasa-designed swimsuit gave the eight-gold-medal winner an unfair advantage over his competitors.

They had a point, but they should perhaps accept this as an intrinsic part of game-playing. Despite the common recognition that rule-breaking is "wrong", [...]

When Valery Gergiev conducted Shostakovich amidst Tskhinvali's blasted concrete, he sought to present a humanitarian Russia, one that had brought safety and civilisation to South Ossetia.

Those with long memories will recall that Shostakovich was not always so favoured by his homeland. In the wake of the Zhdanov Doctrine, works such as his Eighth Symphony were officially shunned for failing to convey the blinding optimism of the Soviet Union sufficiently. [...]

I arrived home from ten days in France this summer. Living enfant sauvage-style at a friend's wil derness farm with shapeless days of tranquillity, I'd found the world a pretty good place to be.

That remained until I switched the radio on and heard of a battle raging between Russia and Georgia. Robert Mugabe saying a defiant "no way" to the idea of power-sharing, meaning five million Zimbabweans will likely [...]

When we talk of peace and wish for peace, we always think in universal, global terms. We would not talk of peace if we thought of it only for a few, otherwise we'd go live in Switzerland or enter a monastery, as people used to do in the dark days of endless invasions.

The second way of thinking about peace, complementary to the first, is that it is an original [...]

"Elite" and "elitism" as terms have transformed into political slurs in Britain and the United States. Simply defined, elitism is a belief in government by the few, while elite means "the best". But the conflation of their meanings, born of not a little ignorance and slovenly language, has produced somewhat different strains of anti-rational toxin in the past few decades.

The British, especially with regard to education, often confuse elitism [...]

Anne Darwin was a "lying bitch", according to her son Mark. He and his brother had grieved and supported her over the disappearance and likely death of their father - her husband - only to learn, six years later, that their parents had enacted an elaborate hoax.

How could the sons not have known, some have asked. Folk wisdom has it you can tell when people are lying. They scratch [...]

The most famous statue of the Roman emperor Hadrian shows him in Greek robes. He wears the beard of a sage. He looks like his protégé Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher-king. Was Hadrian, too, a thinker?

This is one of the questions posed by the British Museum's superb summer blockbuster "Hadrian: Empire and Conflict". As a boy, he earned the nickname "Graeculus", the little Greek, because of his love of Greek [...]

"Enter demos." Alistair Cooke used this ringing phrase in America, his 1973 television series about the country and its history. Earlier episodes had depicted the Jeffersons and the Washingtons; but now he was recalling the time when European settlers began pouring through the gaps in the Appalachians and heading west, to where the assumptions and mores of the eastern seaboard were only distant noises-off for the multitude of nameless homesteaders, [...]

Blood and ink have been spilled over Tibet and its people. But rarely, if ever, has the question been asked: Who are those people ? The problem may be approached linguistically by considering the two phrases "the Tibetan people" (aka "the Tibetans") and "the people of Tibet". These expressions are more or less synonymous, but each has a different focus. "The Tibetan people" emphasises those who are ethnically or culturally [...]