For a few weeks, between mid-April and early May, I was in Bagram, thirty miles north of Kabul, to cover the war. At about six o’clock on most evenings I went for a run. From our tents in...
When Donald Rumsfeld designated the imprisoned Taliban fighters ‘unlawful combatants’ (as opposed to ‘regular’ prisoners of war), he did not simply mean that their...
What was remarkable about the events of 11-13 April in Caracas was not so much the downfall of the President as his precipitate reinstatement – a reversal of fortune that took everybody,...
Of all the elements which go into making Paris such an exquisite object of desire, not the least is the memory of bloodshed. It adds a note of danger to the city’s frivolous pleasures, a...
Every afternoon on RMC INFO, a French commercial radio network where phone-ins are the order of the day, the concerned but knowing voice of the sex counsellor Brigitte Lahaie can be heard...
What has the war between us and the Palestinians been about? About the Israeli attempt to slice what’s left of Palestine into four cantons, by building ‘separation roads’, new...
This report from Ramallah was first circulated on the Internet: at the time of going to press, no foreign journalist has been allowed to report from the town. On 8 April 2002 at 1 p.m., the...
In Harare to watch Mugabe steal the election I quickly got some reminders I didn’t really need that I wasn’t too welcome. The state-owned media repeatedly declared that foreign spies...
About a year ago, during one of the peaks of exasperation at the Government in the left-leaning parts of the British press, I interviewed a member of a think tank close to New Labour. For an hour...
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...