Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Junior enters his sitting room, dressed as Tom Wolfe. It’s mid-September in New York City and hot out. Wolfe, who is 81 years old and lean as a racing greyhound, is wearing a chalk-white linen suit and a cerulean-blue shirt, a white pocket handkerchief with navy trim, leather spectator spat boots in[…]

On the evening of August 9, eight skinny, limber men will line up on the red rubber track inside London’s Olympic Stadium and await the pistol in the 800-meter final. All things being equal, this is what will happen next. David Rudisha, a six-foot-three Kenyan Masai with dark skin and haughty cheekbones, will start hard.[…]

God wants to say a few words. General Ratko Mladic — known by many during the war as “the Butcher of Bosnia”, but who preferred his self-appointed nickname, “God” — is anxious to address the court. This is most irregular. At pre-trial hearings, such as the one now under way in Court 3 of the[…]

At around 2.50pm on 3 January 2012, Court 16 at the Old Bailey fell quiet. The room was not silent exactly. A murder trial is rarely still enough for silence. Among the dozens of assembled lawyers, jurors, journalists, members of the public, relatives of the victim, defendants, policemen and court staff, someone is usually whispering,[…]

When the first call came, Anshul Gupta was dead to the world. It was 7.50am on Tuesday 2 February, 2010. Normally, Gupta would have been showered and suited by this time. He was, and is, a wealthy man with a senior position in a multinational coal-mining firm, and he did not ascend India’s corporate ladder[…]

Power is not a sports car, or a thousand dollar suit, or a first-class plane ticket. It’s not a supermodel on your arm, or a 1996 Dom Perignon in your fridge. That’s just money. No, power is walking into a London hotel room at the age of 64, as Steven Spielberg has just done, wearing[…]