Richard Lloyd Parry

Thirty-two​ years ago, in one of the last and least remembered crises of the 20th century, the United States came to the brink of war over the spread of nuclear weapons. Less than a year and a half into his first term, Bill Clinton was shown evidence that North Korea had removed fuel rods from a plutonium reactor, the first step towards creating the raw material for nuclear warheads. Over...

There​ is nothing palatial about the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. It’s a park, a shaggy forest of ponds and trees, with a handful of modestly elegant modern buildings, an administrative block and a few roads faintly visible in between. There used to be a nine-hole golf course, built in the 1920s by the then crown prince, Hirohito, who took to the game during a visit to Britain. But years...

Manser, intriguingly described as a ‘Swiss cowherd’, spent years in Sarawak living among the Penan, one of the last populations of genuine nomads in the world. For six years, he wore a loincloth, hunted with a blowpipe, lived off snake and monkey meat, and directed the Penan in their struggle against the logging companies that were stripping the rainforests where the nomads roamed. Armed police hunted him through the jungle; the Malaysian government, it was said, had put a bounty on his head. He was captured, and escaped. In the first months of the 21st century, Manser sneaked back into Sarawak. While trekking alone through the jungle, he vanished without a trace.

Fifteen​ years ago, on one of my early visits to Pyongyang, I was taken to the Tower of the Juche Idea, the vertiginous propaganda monument on the south bank of the Taedong River. Peering acrophobically over the railing at the ground 560 feet below, I asked one of the local guides if people ever came here to commit suicide. The young woman, who spoke flawless English, appeared baffled. I...

The man who came closest to persuading me of the virtue of toppling a democratically elected government was a former investment banker and English public schoolboy called Korn Chatikavanij. All the foreign journalists in Bangkok know Korn, and a conversation with him is one of the pleasures of any reporting trip to Thailand. You meet him in the lobby of one of the big hotels, or in his office above a coffee bar – a tall, self-deprecatingly dashing figure with high cheekbones and exquisite shirts. His presence works like air-conditioning on the perspiration and stench of Thai politics.