My friend Robbie’s always had a bit of a thing about guns. In a country like South Africa this is difficult to avoid. A murder rate of roughly four hundred a week and a rape every 26...
In school we were asked to write a short story: fiction, not autobiography. I began mine with the sentence: ‘Bombs dropped, the sky was ablaze, there was no night.’ The teacher, who...
To recapitulate. After Benazir Bhutto was assassinated last December, her will was read out to the family’s assembled political retainers. Her 19-year-old son, Bilawal, inherited the...
The focus of Geoffrey Moorhouse’s book is a great church with one of the most recognisable profiles in Europe: Durham Cathedral. The ‘last office’ – ‘office’...
After a merciless struggle, Barack Obama has defeated Hillary Clinton. And what was the first thing Obama did after his astounding victory? He made a speech at the Aipac conference that broke all...
When Richard Rorty died last year, the New York Times called him ‘one of the world’s most influential contemporary thinkers’. Few philosophers would accept this assessment....
One of the many things that Adorno admired about Beckett’s writing was its ‘scrupulous meanness’, to borrow Joyce’s description of his own literary style in Dubliners....
‘The word “clue”,’ Kate Summerscale writes, ‘derives from “clew” meaning a ball of thread or yarn.’ In mid-Victorian England, clues were satisfying...
Why are there peacocks? And why are there pigs? ‘Nature loves beauty and delights in diversity: that is well shown by the tail of the peacock, for there nature makes it evident that the...
It is said that when representatives of the Society of Friends came to Buckingham Palace in 1945 to present a loyal address at the end of World War Two, the king asked who these people were....
If you had asked an 18th or 19th-century Englishman about his country’s constitution, you would not have got the baffled look you get today. The belief that a constitution is a document and...
It does not always work as it ought, this sense that is not quite a sense. In certain cases, the feeling (or, worse, lack of feeling) of being embodied overwhelms us; the common sense fails and we succumb...
Boubacar Bah, a 52-year-old tailor from Guinea living in Brooklyn, is one of 71 detainees to have died in the last four years in the custody of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. An illegal...
The trial of eight men charged with conspiracy to murder and ‘conspiracy to commit an act of violence likely to endanger the safety of an aircraft’ is underway at Woolwich Crown...
The term ‘graphic novel’ is dismissed by most of its practitioners as either an empty euphemism or a marketing ploy. As Marjane Satrapi puts it, graphic novels simply enable...
The history of thirty years of conflict in Northern Ireland, as it is being written today, might give the impression of a steady progression towards an inevitable and just conclusion. The new...
Abu Musab al-Suri never received an advance for his magnum opus, The Global Islamic Resistance Call, written in safe houses after the fall of the Taliban and published in December 2004 by a...
The unsatisfactory and scattered nature of the evidence compounds the problem, already difficult enough in that the event under consideration has no parallel in history (though it has in myth and fiction)....