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THE SOCIAL ANIMAL The idea that humans have a particular affinity for interaction and communication is not new. Aristotle famously noted that “man is by nature a social animal.” It wasn’t, however, until surprisingly recently in the long sweep of human history that we discovered the biological extent to which this philosophical intuition turns out to be true. A key moment in this new understanding came in 1997, when a research team from Washington University published a pair of papers in the prestigious Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. During this period, PET scanners, which were originally developed for medical purposes, were migrating into neuroscience research, where they provided researchers the breakthrough ability to observe brain activity. The Washington University team looked at a collection of these new brain imaging studies to investigate a simple question: Are there regions of the brain that are involved in all types of brain activity? As the psychologist Matthew Liebe...

The UK’s top civil servant is set to stay in Downing Street and oversee a far-reaching shake-up of the government machine planned by Boris Johnson rather than move to the vacant ambassadorial job in Washington. Cabinet secretary Mark Sedwill had been tipped to move to the US, but friends said he was relishing the prospect of overhauling the Whitehall bureaucracy to help develop a post-Brexit economy — focused on boosting northern England — and to update UK foreign policy based on the concept of “global Britain”. Dominic Cummings, the prime minister’s chief adviser and a fierce critic of Whitehall, is driving the planned changes to the government machine, which will take place after Britain leaves the EU on the scheduled date of January 31. Mr Cummings is credited with devising the Conservatives’ “red wall” general election strategy that saw the party seize seats long held by Labour in northern England, the Midlands and Wales by using Brexit and pledges to improve public services to...

Britain has spent much of the past 75 years in a struggle to avoid adjusting its international ambitions to diminished economic circumstance. Managing relative decline, this is sometimes called. Others prefer to talk about “punching above our weight”. Ask serious students of defence why Britain is modernising its Trident nuclear missile and has just launched two aircraft carriers and the answer is summed up in two words: national prestige. Standing alone in 1940 looms large in the nation’s collective memory. A stubborn reluctance to surrender imperial pretensions has battled a weak economy at home and decisive shifts in the geopolitical balance abroad. It has usually taken a series of economic crises to realign grand ambitions with actual capabilities. The shock of Brexit may well force another such reassessment. There was nothing complicated about the outcome of this month’s general election. In Boris Johnson, the voters were offered a Conservative chancer waving the flag of Englis...

. 356 . chapter eleven The Deterioration of Sino-Japanese Relations, 1992–2018 Only once in the 2,000 years of contact between China and Japan has an emperor of Japan or China visited the other country. It was unimaginable that the Chinese would ever have welcomed Emperor Hirohito, the highest symbol of Japanese invaders. After Emperor Hirohito died in January 1989, Japanese political leaders initially tried to play down his responsibility for the war, but China’s foreign minister, Qian Qichen, representing China at Emperor Hirohito’s funeral ceremonies in Tokyo, rebuked the Japanese for this and told them they should study their history. Not only Chinese spokespersons but also Western and even many Japanese leaders and writers acknowledged that Emperor Hirohito had attended meetings at which war plans were discussed. In 1989, the succession to the throne of Akihito, who at the end of World War II was only eleven years old, provided an opportunity to highlight the new era of p...