‘Kosovo,’ the Prime Minister tells us, ‘is on the doorstep of Europe.’ The province, we learn, is situated near countries like Greece and Italy with which British people...
Hour after hour the foreign press lined the raised road on the Macedonian side of the border, gazing at the thousands of refugees from Kosovo massed in the field below. It was a vigil in which...
Islamabad remains the official capital, but these days real power in Pakistan is exercised from the Punjabi capital of Lahore. This city, dry, warm and abundant, where I spent the first 20 years...
In the last week of July 1939, just before the summer recess, a hitherto unannounced Bill was sprung on the House of Commons. It was said by the Government to require immediate enactment, and was...
On travelling to the mining region of the Jiu Valley in Romania earlier this year, I found myself once more facing a difficulty that had become familiar to me in a decade of reporting from...
One of the difficulties with weapons is that they do not automatically self-destruct once they have fulfilled their function. The problem particularly afflicts Americans who, taking advantage of...
The military should make a clean break from politics to retrieve its fast-vanishing reputation. General Olusegun Obasanjo, August 1993 No, I am not interested in becoming the head of state...
The old dons arrived in armourplated black limousines to pay their last respects. They had often tried to do away with him, but they gave him a royal send-off. He was, after all, the...
How do millenarians explain themselves when the millennium skips by and the imperfect secular world fails to implode? This seemingly frivolous question is suddenly topical in Washington DC, not...
Most great Old Master paintings have been sold several times at public auction over the last three centuries, many have been sold more frequently and only a few have escaped auction altogether,...
In his realist classic of 1984, First among Equals, Jeffrey Archer has a Labour minister from a Northern constituency disappearing with a prostitute for five minutes or so. She recognises Raymond...
The problem with Nancy Mitford, according to one of her sisters (the Communist? Possibly. The troublesome, giggly one who fancied Hitler? Not likely. The Duchess? Probably), is that she never...
Harare is morose under the rains, more drenching this year even than last year, and longer than most can remember; five or seven centimetres, day after day. It’s made the water table too...
Sensitive and introspective persons keep a journal secure in the knowledge that their secrets will never be exposed to public scrutiny. This was hardly why, in 1985, the former Labour MP Woodrow...
Until recently, the notion that the academic subject called ‘English’ had any sort of history would have seemed rather odd. Hadn’t it always just, well, existed? Surely, at his...
Nowadays in Africa, it is easier to attract overseas aid for projects that address ‘the concerns of women’ than it is to fund almost any other kind of initiative. Most donors want to...
Edvard Benes, as A.J.P. Taylor once remarked, enjoyed the doubtful distinction of having signed away his country twice, once to the Germans, and later to the Russians. His capitulation at Munich...
History, it’s said again and again, is what makes the loss of Kosovo so much harder for the Serbs to entertain than any of the setbacks they’ve borne so far under the dark stewardship...