Slobodan Milosevic died in March 2006, a few months before his trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague would have ended. The trial, at which...
Like many professional subversives, Deleuze and Guattari worked well in institutions.
Thomas Mann wrote this engaging novella in a few weeks in 1943. (The new translation by Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann, which is brisk and direct, is a welcome replacement of the fussier and...
The world is a complex place. That is a truism, but perhaps complexity can be investigated rather than taken for granted. Think of the sorts of causal interaction one might regard as...
Today, the team leader tells me, is a suck-it-and-see day. This means that arrangements and timings are fluid and that plans could change at the drop of a hat. Despite the DI’s insistence that the operation...
Bruce Sterling’s 1998 political thriller, Distraction, is set in the year 2044, and roving bands of land-based pirates have taken over the American hinterlands, swamps and roadways, armed...
On 15 September, the eve of Mexico’s bicentenary, President Felipe Calderón threw the country a $3 billion birthday party. An hour before midnight, he took the tricoloured flag from...
Cherished for centuries as the great bulwark of British liberty, the remedy of habeas corpus has in recent years lost much of its practical importance. Experienced judges may retire without ever...
English has a problem with the morally bad. Terry Eagleton reports his son’s approving reaction when told that his father was writing a book on evil: ‘Wicked!’ Words like...
In 1979, shortly after the signing of the peace treaty between their two countries, President Navon of Israel presented President Sadat of Egypt with a copy of The Guide for the Perplexed,...
Late 16th-century England had no very great portrait painters, but at least one of its dramatists created a gallery of images – principally through his characters – at once brilliant...
Those who offer scientific explanations of the pervasiveness of religion in human life are usually not religious themselves, and their explanations are not intended to be compatible with the...
I once met a young priest in the west of Ireland who told me that he was to be sent on the missions the following day. ‘Where are you being posted?’ I asked. ‘Birmingham,’...
On 12 March 1689, James II, the deposed king of England and Ireland, Catholic and absolutist, landed at Kinsale on the south coast of Ireland with a substantial French force. He had fled England...
I began burning books during my third year in China. The first book I burned was called A Swedish Gospel Singer. On the cover there was a drawing of a blonde girl wearing a crucifix with her...
During the break-up with Kimberly Quinn that precipitated his break-up with the Home Office, David Blunkett is reported to have warned her: ‘The law is on my side. I know because I made the...
In 1959 the psychological doctrine known as ‘behaviourism’ was at the peak of its influence. Pioneered in the early 20th century by Edward Lee Thorndike, Clark Hull and J.B. Watson,...
When Germany’s ultimatum – delivered, as the Kaiser had explained, ‘only with the friendliest intentions towards Belgium’ – expired in August 1914, von...