At 6 a.m. on 12 June 2002, four FBI agents barged into the SoHo loft of Samuel Waksal, the former CEO of the biotech company ImClone Systems Inc, and led him away in handcuffs: he was charged...
The subject of Daniel Ellsberg’s memoir is the decadence of American democracy. The conditions he began fighting in 1969 are much worse today and far more dangerous to many more people. Yet...
As Tony Blair prepares to consolidate his place in the history books as Britain’s greatest wartime Prime Minister since John Major, shipping our boys out to the Gulf, boots or no boots, his...
The sudden death of Roy Jenkins took us all by surprise. He was over eighty, of course, and with a heart problem that had required major surgery. This latterly gave him a good excuse to sit down...
Pakistan has been described as ‘the most dangerous place on earth’, yet Owen Bennett Jones’s title is appropriate, for though storms rage all around Pakistan, the country itself...
For two decades – more or less since the Falklands War, and the end of the military dictatorships that had become an international byword for counter-revolutionary ferocity – South...
I have never travelled further from New York than Western Europe; Saad Eddin Ibrahim is an advocate of democracy imprisoned in Egypt. But Saad and I are both outlying members of the same sprawling...
The resignation of Estelle Morris surprised most people: not just because of its timing but because she resigned on grounds of incompetence – to outsiders she seemed more unlucky than...
One sunny afternoon last month I sat drinking a glass of tea in the office of a functionary in Mus, a market town in eastern Anatolia known for producing sugar beets, tobacco and violence. In the...
A free-market model doesn’t – and can’t – work for the education system: there isn’t the clear distinction between ‘consumer’ and ‘product’ that proponents of the market would have us...
Conceived and researched during the 1990s, these two books nevertheless make important contributions to our understanding of today’s international turbulence and uncertainty. Taken...
Over the long term, Germans have made a good job of confronting the criminal, genocidal character of the Third Reich. Historical writing, schoolbooks, literary works, public and political debate...
It’s unlikely that Sidney Webb features in Tony Blair’s pantheon of political heroes. It would, in fact, be difficult to think of a less likely match for Tony and Cherie than Sidney...
I’ve started giving my students money. Not to bribe my way to favourable teaching reviews, but to provoke reflection about the relations between economic and sociological views of human...
In Westminster Abbey a couple of years ago, I stood for over an hour talking to Neal Ascherson. It was one of those freezing January evenings – cold stone, long shadows – and we...
Presented as a pendant to Age of Extremes, a personal portrait hung opposite the historical landscape, what light does Interesting Times throw on Eric Hobsbawm’s vision of the 20th century,...
Those who would measure the timetable for Saddam’s atomic programme in years may be seriously underestimating the situation and the gravity of the threat. George Bush, November 1990 He...
It is possible to love football without loving the culture of the English Premiership. The waves of cash that have rolled into the game since the deal with Sky in 1991 may not have fundamentally...