When the Prime Minister bumped into Boris Johnson in Davos last week, the Mayor, resplendent in woolly hat, assured him that he had been acting as his unofficial envoy at the World Economic Forum. Yes, Boris had a few mischievous things to say about the “rhetoric of austerity” while he was in town. But – he reassured the PM – every time he met a senior European politician, he was praising his speech: “Bien joué, David Cameron, n’est-ce pas?”

Turkish Airlines has become the world's fastest growing airline company. Its CEO, Temel Kotil, explained toEuropolitics why Istanbul is Europe's natural hub for passengers heading to Asia and Africa. The tender for the construction of the city's huge third airport was published on 24 January in theOfficial Gazette of the Republic of Turkey .

“Culture is an axis of diplomacy that was practiced by any number of autocratic regimes, Hitler as well as Stalin,” said Lorraine de Meaux...
Russian officials have even suggested that Mr. Depardieu’s flight toward Russia’s flat income tax rate of 13 percent may start a trend. “The distinctiveness of our tax system is poorly known about in the West,” a deputy prime minister, Dmitri O. Rogozin, wrote...

A new study commissioned by VisitBritain and its partners in the GREAT campaign suggests that global perceptions of ‘Welcome’, Britain’s ‘Overall Nation Brand’, and the UK’s sporting and cultural credentials, have significantly improved thanks to the hosting of the London 2012 Games.

Music is a universal language and it is one of the ways to learn about another culture. To spread the teaching of Chinese music to the world, the Confucius Institute has set up the first Music Confucius Institute in Copenhagen.

Summits were more fun in those days. When Ferdinand III, the Habsburg monarch of the Holy Roman Empire, arrived in Regensburg, the Brussels of its time, in late 1652, he brought 60 musicians and three dwarves. There were sleigh rides, fireworks and the first Italian opera ever performed in Germanic lands. Aside from that, the Reichstag (imperial diet) was much like today’s European Council, the gathering for leaders of the member states.

On Wednesday morning, Italian Foreign Minister Giulio Terzi di Sant’Agata stood in front of Michelangelo’s David-Apollo in an atrium of the National Gallery of Art. The sculpture last graced the museum in 1949 as a post-World War II sign of friendship between the two countries. The statue — one of the master’s many unfinished works — was not the only unfinished project in the room.