The result of the election is indeed a remarkable one: a Government liked and respected by few and despised by some preserved its already huge majority virtually intact, and it did so with a...
Britain’s policy towards Hitler in the later 1930s is one of those historical topics that are dead but won’t lie down. The supply of relevant facts has virtually dried up. But what to...
At the end of the 18th century the main threat to British possession of India seemed to come from France. In Egypt in 1798, Bonaparte studied the campaigns of Alexander the Great. He had...
Jean de Dieu, 11, was curled up, a ball of flesh and blood, the look in his eyes was a glance from nowhere … without vision; Marie-Ange, aged nine, was propped up against a tree trunk...
The British Empire attained its maximum extent just after the First World War, but the peak of imperial visibility and imperialist sentiment at home was arguably reached two or three decades...
Eighty-six nations signed the protocol at the UN in New York; Clinton signed for the US at a subsequent, ineffectual meeting in Buenos Aires. Together, the signatories emit 88 per cent of excess global...
At Christmas 1859, one of the 19th century’s most celebrated headmasters suddenly, and for no obvious reason, resigned his job. The Rev. Charles Vaughan had taken charge at Harrow in 1845,...
What happened last November in Florida diverted attention from Ralph Nader’s part in the outcome of the Presidential election. In Florida itself, where every vote mattered (I won’t...
The British Army occupied Jerusalem on Sunday, 9 December 1917, and withdrew on 14 May 1948. During its brief imperium in the Promised Land, Britain kept the promise made in 1917 by its Foreign...
The United States could produce energy far in excess of its needs, yet President Bush promotes his energy policy with dramatic urgency. The Bush White House opposes any government interventions...
Corinthians, it was once said, worshipped at the tomb of the unknown god. Liberals worship at the tomb of the unknown principle; they’d be prepared to die for their beliefs, if only they knew...
It is not what they built. It is what they knocked down. It is not the houses. It is the spaces between the houses. It is not the streets that exist. It is the streets that no longer exist.
I could hardly bring myself to read this book. When I finished it, I was more puzzled than ever about what I had witnessed before and at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. I was...
With Yeoman Hague’s election pledge to ‘keep Britain independent’ and ‘give us back our country’ still echoing around the LRB office, a press release arrives on the...
Vladimir Putin may or may not be dismantling Yeltsinism. But he is not dismantling ‘democracy’, for no such system existed in Russia before his accession to power. After a decade of...
One evening a few months ago when Clinton was still President, I found myself in a dive on Eighth Avenue between 41st and 42nd Street. A Democratic Congressman, ‘a friend of the people of...
In memoriam, Jesús Antonio Bejarano, murdered by unknown assassins on his way to class, 1999. Many more people continue to die in Colombia than in the Middle Eastern troubles between...
Henry Luce – who coined the catchphrase about ‘the American Century’ – once said that the crucial event of that century would be the Christianisation of China. He meant...