Throughout the time that he was Prime Minister Clement Attlee read only the Times. He was, he said, too busy to bother with other newspapers. The fact that the Times was firmly Tory and, after a...
‘Sounding off’ in the column of that name in last Sunday’s Observer (we go to press on 22 March), Melvyn Bragg – novelist, broadcaster, Controller of Arts Programmes at...
It is nearly ten years since Japan was about to take over the known world. Until a month ago, the United States seemed unable to put a foot wrong. Then it, too, showed ominous signs of faltering....
The first execution I saw was in August 1998. All the executions in Kabul take place in the football stadium, and I sat high in the concrete terraces, buying endless small glasses of green tea...
Christine Keeler is insistent on Stephen Ward having been at the dead centre of political intrigue, rather than just a dilettante at that as well as everything else. Her wish to retrieve her past is understandable....
This last while I have carried my heart in my boots. For a minute or two I actually imagined I could be responsible for the spread of foot and mouth disease across Britain. On my first...
It’s not too hard today to recognise the sovereign individual, supposed master of his fate and captain of his soul, as a sociopath. The idea of the sovereign state, by contrast, still...
The political Left has always had trouble with ethics, in theory as well as in practice. The practical problems hardly need recounting. It was one of the great tragedies of the 20th century that...
For an old Red like me, bowed down by years of Thatcher, Reagan, Clinton and Blair, these two books are full of exhilaration and hope. George Monbiot writes mainly about Britain in a terse...
It’s not an easy thing to have on your conscience that you were personally responsible for putting Robert Mugabe in power but Wilfred Mhanda has had to live with that knowledge for the last...
The family feud is rarely mentioned as a factor in contemporary politics, perhaps because its tribal character does not fit well into the ‘rational actor’ model favoured by political...
At the Wye plantation on the eastern shore of Maryland, the department of agriculture of the University of Maryland raises beautiful Black Angus cattle with all the latest equipment and best...
Robert Skidelsky’s John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Britain completes a remarkable biography. No other biographer of Keynes is likely to surpass it, and everyone who has an interest in the...
Call it a crisis of the written Constitution, caused by the enormous historical gap that has opened up between the Constitution of 1787 and the living Constitution of the 21st century. During the 35 days...
The first time I went to Chile, while General Pinochet was still under arrest in Britain, it seemed wise while I was in Santiago to read books about him discreetly. Early on the hot, clear summer...
A remarkably high proportion of those who now teach and write about the modern Middle East in this country were taught by Albert Hourani. He encouraged the historians he supervised to take an...
In Being and Nothingness Sartre has an admirable passage about the stubborn human tendency to ‘fill’, the fact that a good part of human life, in politics as elsewhere, is devoted to...
When, in May, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson gives up his role as Tory MP for the Spectator to take over from Michael Heseltine as the editor of Henley-on-Thames, you have to wonder where...