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...
Getting to Dave Lewis’s farm was not easy, even though I had instructions.* Travelling any distance out of Harare is fairly tense stuff because you can never be sure you’ll have...
More than a year ago I was invited to speak on ‘Social Science in an Age of Transition’ in Vienna. I was happy to accept. Vienna had a glorious role in the building of world social...
When the Guardian covered the recent Budget, it had a lot of fun unpacking the surprises sprung by Gordon Brown in the course of his demonstration that ‘all this prudence is for a...
Attached as the British have been to their monarchy (even when disliking individual incumbents), they have been curiously reluctant to admit that the institution has any effective powers. At some...