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 –...
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,...
From the Fifties to the Seventies, historians of early modern Europe were tempted to search for general regularities with which to order the past, if not quite to explain it. Examples are the...
From 1830, when it was conquered, until 1962, when the Evian Agreements made it into an independent state, Algeria was said to be French. Since 1962, because of French investment there, and...
Ineptitude and confounded expectations lie at the heart of military affairs. Probably not one war in a hundred has conformed to the course plotted for it by those who launched it. Journalists...
A few years ago, in the mid-Nineties, the Independent attempted to halt its decline with a bold stroke. For the first time in the history of journalism a national newspaper sold itself as a think...
I had managed only one speech against the war in Kosovo when I was carted off to hospital in the middle of the night with what I later discovered was an aortic aneurism. Hardly had the surgeons...