Not long after the Bush Administration took power in January, I was invited to lunch at a glamorous restaurant in New York by a group of editors and writers from an influential American...
Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria (1949-93), the most talented and richest of Colombian drug bosses, lived his contradictions. A gold-framed portrait of the Virgin Mary hung over the bed in which he...
In the distance I see a huge black blob disfiguring the sky. Maybe a thunderstorm’s brewing? I step in front of a fleeing office worker: ‘Excuse me, but has something happened?’ His answer comes...
Much has been said in recent days about the instability of Pakistan. But the danger lies not so much within the population as a whole, where religious extremists are a small minority (more...
In this short book, Christopher Hitchens sets down the main charges against Kissinger: murder, violation of human rights and complicity in mass atrocities on a scale equalled only by Eichmann,...
Canadians make much of something Pierre Trudeau said in a speech to the Washington Press Club in 1969: ‘Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how...
I had been living in England for just eight months when Bobby Sands died in the Maze Prison hospital after spending 66 days on hunger strike. Speaking on the day of his death in the House of...
‘Uhuru has a new name’, an advertising billboard for mobile phones announces in Dar es Salaam. ‘Uhuru’ – Swahili for ‘freedom’ or...
Nine years from now there will be a longish round of spectacular jamborees in Latin America, as its various nations celebrate the bicentenaries of their independence from the Spanish and...
Yeltsin’s first volume of autobiography, Against the Grain (1990), showed how he emerged from obscurity as a defender of democracy and social justice. In March 1989, against the wishes of...
In the afternoon of 17 September 1961 a four-engine DC-6 passenger plane SE-BDY Albertina took off from Leopoldville, the capital of the former Belgian Congo, bound for Ndola in Northern Rhodesia...
Thatcherism continues to cast its long shadow over British politics. At the general election Tony Blair explicitly claimed to be moving beyond Thatcherism and William Hague implicitly claimed to...
It hasn’t taken long, if you count from the first Nato bombing runs on Serbia in March 1999, to deliver Slobodan Milosevic up to The Hague. That’s the jaunty Foreign Office view, at...
Among the intellectual figures who have shaped the modern world Adam Smith stands out as someone who doesn’t frighten the laity, might be positively welcomed indeed by middle England....
In 1830, a few months before he died in a Soho rooming-house, Hazlitt published a lengthy essay on a new biography of Daniel Defoe in the Edinburgh Review, where he remarked that in Robinson...
What is wrong with the idea of a world state? John Rawls, the world’s most celebrated living political philosopher, believes that the answer is relatively straightforward. ‘I follow...
‘Incidentally, they know you know they know you know the code.’ Peter Ustinov’s Cold War satire Romanoff and Juliet (1956) could have been about Salisbury Court, the London home...
Throughout the four years between its two landslide defeats, the Conservative Party was intent on pleasing itself and its ultra-rightist supporters in the press, with the predictable and...