The basics any government has to provide if it hopes to be popular are food, water, security and shelter. Food is so cheap that obesity is common among the poor, while Marie Antoinettish fads for organic and against GM food insult the world's hungry while amusing the wealthy. As floods engulf the southern lowlands, water is hardly a problem at the moment, although the unpredictable effects of global warming may [...]

Whether we live in a golden age of scientific dispute is disputed, not least by Professor Steve Jones, but we certainly have lived through a golden age of science writing. Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould, E O Wilson, Steven Pinker and Jones himself have taken evolution out of academia and engaged the educated public. Yet, for all their skill, watching them has been like watching a concert party for the [...]

Oxfam was founded in 1942 to bring aid to the oppressed of Nazi Europe, a cause that didn't make it popular with the Churchill government. After the Germans occupied Greece, the Royal Navy blocked the shipping lanes. Food and medicines couldn't get through to civilians, and famine set in. Lifting the blockade might have helped the starving, but Whitehall wondered whether food meant for the hungry wouldn't end up in [...]

Julian Baggini seems a standard member of the liberal intelligentsia. The books he reads, the clothes he wears and food he eats match those of tens of thousands of others. He stands out because he has done what very few of his contemporaries are prepared to do and confronted England. Not by denouncing its government or letting out long sighs about its lack of sophistication, but by living among people [...]

When an old friend heard I would be seeing Simon Baron-Cohen, she asked if I could describe her family to him and then ask a question. I did my best. My friend is a wife and mother of two, I told him when we met at his Cambridge college. She is a highly numerate and purposeful woman who has had a successful career in the City. Her husband is also [...]

No one who looked at the liberal left from the outside could pretend that it provided anything other than token opposition to the "insurgents" from the Ba'ath Party and al-Qaeda. The British Liberal Democrats, the Continental social-democratic parties, the African National Congress and virtually every leftish newspaper and journal on the planet were unable to accept that the struggles of Arabs and Kurds had anything to do with them. Mainstream [...]

I quickly learned that it was pointless to invite Andrew Oswald to engage in fanciful speculation. He is an economist to his bones, who believes in what he can count - and little else. I saw him at Warwick University, and it felt fitting that he should have found a professorship in a monument to the modernism of the mid-1960s. Warwick's blocks show only straight lines; no place here for [...]

I've had Professor Ted Honderich's books on my shelves all my adult life. I won't pretend to reach for them often, but the argument of his 1976 essays on violence has stayed with me. Inequality kills, it runs. The poor have shorter lives than the rich, not only in famine-ridden Saharan hell-holes but in Europe and North America, too. We should, therefore, overcome squeamish liberal objections to the violence of [...]

The authors of two of the most original 9/11 books hit a nerve because they had that rare ability to describe a fact we didn't want to see even though it was in front of our noses. Paul Berman's Terror and Liberalism and Ian Buruma's Occidentalism (co-written with Avishai Margalit) said we were up against fascism. The cults of death, contempt for soft and mediocre democracies, fear of women and [...]

If you are a youngish graduate making a career in the media or arts anywhere in the English-speaking world, the chances are you will have bought The Corrections and helped make it the bestselling literary novel to date in the 21st century. It is also likely that you would enjoy 9 Adam Street, a private club in a Georgian town house just off the Strand.

It's a place for London's [...]