High oil prices are bad for the world for any number of reasons. They cause inflation, which enriches the wealthy before indirectly causing unemployment once interest rates are increased by...
We know both too much about Margaret Thatcher and too little. She was 20th-century Britain’s longest serving Prime Minister, and occupied the post for a longer continuous period than anyone...
There’s been a bit of fuss recently over whether, and with what definition, the word Blairism should appear in new dictionaries. The Compact Oxford found no room for it, saying that the...
A vision of hell awaited visitors to the pavilion built by the Cnidians at Delphi, as terrifying as any Christian apocalypse, albeit less violent and more intellectually stimulating. One part of...
Three years after E.H. Carr’s death in 1982, Mikhail Gorbachev began the process which led to the collapse of the Soviet Union and Soviet Communism, a development which at first sight...
For a committed sedentary like myself, one of the most striking aspects of the populating of the town of Celebration, Florida, built by the Disney Corporation in the late 1990s, was the ease with which...
I’m standing at the end of the bridge to North Korea. It stops here at the border, in a riot of twisted metal. Ahead of me the piers march in pairs, on across the Yalu river until they...
By now everyone must know the deal: if 75 per cent of people who download the monthly installments of Stephen King’s ‘new’ online novel, The Plant, pay for it, he’ll keep...
We are accustomed to finding that we have been lied to. To insure ourselves against such deceptions we repeat the mantra that we don’t believe everything we read in the newspapers. There...
I was in the Harare headquarters of the Movement for Democratic Change when news came through that two boxes of uncounted ballots had turned up in Buhera North, the constituency in which the...
The Government begins its fourth year in office in not very good shape: indeed, in something of a fix. It is probably not too much of a fix: not being the Conservative Party should still see them...
In a recent TV programme about King George VI, Peregrine Worsthorne commended his late sovereign for being a dull man, brains being the last thing the British constitution requires of a monarch....
Do real queens or goddesses get raped? Can beauty become vile? Such problems are raised by Helen of Troy, wife of King Menelaus, and by Sita, wife of Rama. Their stories (in multiple versions)...
The United States is widely believed to have acquired a New Economy, having achieved the longest economic expansion in its history and the lowest unemployment rate for thirty years. Untold wealth...
Tall, silver-haired and bearded, with a mesmerising voice and beguiling manner of delivery, John Pocock has long struck me as the Gandalf of the historical profession. The range, altitude and...
In Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, a crazed American general launches an unauthorised nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. The film disturbed audiences in 1963 with its portrayal of...
Now that the commotion caused by the anti-capitalist demo on Mayday has died down, it’s possible to judge the effect it has had on the future of the ‘green’ protest movement in...
Last month the British Library launched their Adopt-a-Book scheme, which is, they say, doing very well, with hundreds of people responding. Prices start at £15, for which you get your name...