When 25-year-old Valentine Strasser seized power in Sierra Leone in 1992, he became the world’s youngest head of state. Today he lives with his mother and spends his days drinking gin by the roadside. What went wrong?

From using euphemisms such as “collateral damage” to faking orgasms, we practise deception all the time. But in order to lie better to others, we must first fool ourselves.

After a chance meeting with a former News of the World executive who told him his phone had been hacked, Hugh Grant couldn’t resist going back to him – with a hidden tape recorder – to find out if there was more to the story...

A Sarah Palin impersonator, a man in a “big government” fat suit, Newt Gingrich’s presidential entrance and a 15-foot cardboard foetus: meet America’s reinvigorated right at its annual jamboree.

Religion is an easy target for atheists, but, as Tim Parks discovered, there’s no escaping that there’s more to life than rational thinking and the material world. He found the key on a Buddhist retreat in the countryside.

Thirteen ways of looking at the England manager as he prepares his team for the World Cup –– from bibliophile to existentialist.

As Italians prepare to go to the polls, the author Tim Parks identifies a ritualistic sparring that is destroying his adopted home and the country he loves.

Is Melville’s Moby-Dick the ultimate American novel? Even today, it haunts a nation’s thoughts and dreams.

In a world without faith or metaphysics, we need a grand illusion like the European Union. Even with all their prevarications and no-shows, the British cannot cheat us out of this latter-day castle in the sky.