Iain Macwhirter

IT is 6.20am on a dreich Friday morning in Edinburgh’s Dynamic Earth exhibition centre. Standing in front of the plastic planets and dinosaur kitsch, is Scotland’s First Minister, Alex Salmond. He assembles his tired features into his best ‘brave face’ as he concedes defeat in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum.

Is capitalism working? Iain Macwhirter reviews to books on the subject...

My favourite of the many and varied conspiracy theorists cited in Anna Merlan's Cook's tour of the wild and wacky, has to be our own David Icke. This former BBC sports reporter has a vast and loyal following for what must be the most high concept conspiracy theory since Satanism.

EDWARD Luce was so excited by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 that he raced by car to the Brandenburg Gate to catch the debris from the fall of Communism. It seemed that nothing could halt the march of Western liberal democracy. Thirty years later it all looks very different.

IF independence is on the agenda again, following Brexit, so must be the purpose of independence. There’s little point in setting up a new country for the sake of it; you have to have some idea of what this “better nation” is going to look like.