The sense of lives ruined for no purpose is pervasive in Liberia, a country colonised by freed US slaves, cultivated as a strategic anti-Communist American interest in Africa and largely ignored...
In August 1940, Winston Churchill likened the relationship between Britain and America to the Mississippi: ‘It just keeps rolling along,’ he told the Commons, ‘full flood,...
It is above all the city’s Renaissance art and architecture that draws visitors to Florence. Those calming vistas were no less precious in the 15th century when they were erected against...
Stendhal once observed that to introduce politics into a work of fiction was like firing a pistol during a performance in the theatre, a loud and unwanted intrusion of the real on a setting all...
When rebel forces advanced on Monrovia in June, with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees recoiling from a ‘horrific’ situation, the Bush Administration was loath to send in a...
Amid the squat concrete towers and traffic bridges of the new and expanding Damascus, a few mud-brick houses endure like Palaeolithic mammals resisting the inevitability of extinction. Massive...
Sixteen years ago, not long after I began working as an editorial assistant at the LRB, my bosses gave me a top-secret assignment. My mission, should I choose to accept it, was to find out if...
Valéry Giscard d’Estaing begins his generally sensible if utterly hideous preamble to the new draft European Constitution with a line from Thucydides’ History of the...
David Blunkett’s latest Criminal Justice Bill, this Government’s 12th piece of such legislation since coming to power in 1997, will go a long way to producing a caste of untouchables...
On the morning of 5 August 1840, a large pleasure boat chartered by a Frenchman was under steam at London Bridge. The owners of the Edinburgh Castle seem to have been remarkably incurious about...
Early in May, on his visit to Israel and the Occupied Territories, Colin Powell met with Mahmoud Abbas, the new Palestinian Prime Minister, and separately with a small group of civil society...
Given that it’s not so far been settled to everyone’s satisfaction exactly what the belligerents had in mind when they went to war in 1914, we shouldn’t perhaps get too...
In November last year, to the relief of the Government, Myra Hindley died. Hindley, who had served 36 years, was the most high-profile victim of a series of Administrations which, in pursuit of...
I gave the little girl a name. Rita. I doubt it’s a common name in Iraq but it seemed to fit her round face, brown eyes and straggle of blood-soaked hair. The military medics staunched the...
Harold Macmillan’s judgment on Anthony Eden, that ‘he was trained to win the Derby in 1938; unfortunately, he was not let out of the starting stalls until 1955,’ was echoed by...
The Four Seasons hotel, Houston, 20 January 2000. The investment managers and analysts packed into the ballroom are paying only partial attention to the presentation by the Enron Corporation. On...
Hollesley Bay Prison in Suffolk is an unlikely spiritual home for English socialism. Britain’s most easterly lock-up, its seaside location, stud-farm and dairy have earned it the nickname...
I foresee that man will resign himself each day to more atrocious undertakings; soon there will be no one but soldiers and bandits. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’...