London’s social and economic problems are severe. There are more unemployed people in the Borough of Islington than in Newcastle, and more in the whole of London than in Northern Ireland,...
12 June 1999, Kukes, Albania. The Germans came to Kukes today. They were late, but the waiting crowd cheered as tanks and APCs rolled past. Yesterday a mild-mannered lieutenant-colonel told us...
No specific background was required when I joined the Factory Inspectorate in the mid-1960s, before it became part of the Health and Safety Executive: a philosophy graduate could be as successful...
On Saturday 29 January, I left my in-laws’ house in Wadham Road, Bootle, and headed for the Strand Precinct to buy myself a shirt. As I reached the junction with Stanley Road a building...
Mankind is bicameral as the sea is salt. In 1997 there were 58 bicameral parliaments. Within their respective countries, Nebraska and Queensland were the only states not to be bicameral; among...
I was in Saudi Arabia when American and British planes pounded Iraq for four successive nights in December 1998. Or rather, I was there for three of the four nights – the Saudis had...
The voice on the phone was terrified and tearful. ‘I’m in such trouble, such trouble.’ It took me quite a while to get Josephine to say what had happened. She is the 18-year-old...
Throughout this book, the poet Douglas Dunn provides epigraphs and quotations. His final contribution occurs in the last section, ‘Epilogue: The Last Day’, a sort of diary of what Tom...
The broad new motorway which used to connect Central Europe with Greece and Turkey was eerily empty when I took it last autumn. On the fertile Vojvodinian lowlands between Belgrade and the...
The mountains of Venezuela rise up almost sheer from the shores of the Caribbean, with gashes of red earth below and vivid green forest above, the peaks entirely lost in grey cloud. From the...
This is a rather relaxed book. As such, it may disappoint those who know the author through his brilliant contributions to early Stuart history, or his recent principled interventions in debate...
It was not always easy being a Fascist prophet in interwar Europe. The local electorate seemed deaf to one’s warnings and strangely faithful to old, uncharismatic Conservatives or stolid...
The image of tens of thousands of protesters besieging the World Trade Organisation summit in early December was startling, in part because of the incongruity of the location: Seattle, the most...
These days swearing occasionally or having a glass of wine at lunchtime is enough to qualify you as a bit of a character. As newspapers become less important, however, journalists become more self-important,...
The other peripheral or marginal candidates have all received much more attention than they could normally expect, simply because of their supposedly ‘human’ qualities. Donald Trump – a ludicrous...
On 5 October 1990, Britain entered the ERM: on 16 September 1992, ‘Black Wednesday’, Britain left the ERM. These two events and the years between them were crucial in recent British...
Many in Britain will have welcomed the recent humiliation of the European Commission. Usually seen as embodying all that’s bad about the EU, it’s unelected, arrogant and provenly...
I can’t remember liking my German grandfather. ‘Oh,’ said my mother, ‘you adored him when you were a baby.’ That was in the incredible time when things were right,...