Downtown Kabul is Fat City, Afghan style. The first shock for a new visitor is how undamaged and commercially busy it looks. On my second day, I bought a camera, one of a large range, from the...
Italy has long occupied a peculiar position within the concert of Europe. By wealth and population it belongs alongside France, Britain and Germany as one of the four leading states of the Union....
You will probably be surprised to learn of the massive and virtually unchecked power that the Left holds in the United States. After all, you’ll say, aren’t the key American...
Shortly after Oliver Cromwell’s death in September 1658, Dryden wrote some ‘Heroique Stanza’s, Consecrated to the Glorious Memory of his most Serene and Renowned Highnesse...
The sight of a man in fatigues stalking around a poor country is guaranteed to arouse the interest of ideologues in richer ones, whatever their persuasion. Yet the recent ‘martyrdom’...
The special celebrity guest, a common enough creature on our TV screens, is a rarer bird on the books pages of the nation’s newspapers and magazines. But a tip for twitchers (should there...
More than any other capital city, Jerusalem demonstrates the power of symbols in international politics. The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is one of the most bitter and protracted...
When I was a child in the mid-1950s, there was an American television programme called You Are There. The pretence was that a reporter, who in my mistaken memory was always Walter Cronkite, would...
I was led away from my PhD in theology and into working in the financial markets by a love of poker. Trading, it seemed to me, might be something like playing poker all day, for vast sums of...
Neil Kinnock is a problematic figure in modern British politics. He was leader of the Labour Party for nine years and presided over a number of profound changes in both its structure and its...
Sixty years ago, German soldiers shaved off the beards of Orthodox Jews. Now American soldiers are doing the same to Islamic fundamentalists captured in Afghanistan, before flying them to a...
At sunset on Christmas Day last year, hundreds of Palestinian Arabs from the once Christian towns of Bethlehem and Beit Sahour assembled outside the burned and gutted Paradise Hotel in Bethlehem...
Like it or not, terrorist attacks will be a recurring part of our future. The balance of technology has shifted, making it possible for a small band of zealots to wreak devastation where we least...
Among the objects of hatred and ridicule in English memory the regime of Oliver Cromwell’s Major-Generals has a towering place. The division of the country, in 1655, into 12 districts...
As the Afghanistan crisis subsides, the European question once again assumes centre stage. ‘Surrender’, a tabloid headline proclaimed shortly before Christmas. This wasn’t an...
Why two more Churchill biographies? Geoffrey Best reckons there are fifty or a hundred out there already. Two good reasons to want to add to them would be the unearthing of new evidence or a...
In the slow weeks before the Taliban fled Kabul, weeks of B-52 vapour trails drawn across blank blue skies, of sporadic bombing and constant rumour, it was easy to find General Abdul Basir. He...
‘The world is closing on us, pushing us through the last passage, and we tear off our limbs to pass through.’ Thus Mahmoud Darwish, writing in the aftermath of the PLO’s exit...