An elderly Serb in the Kosovo village of Mlecan told me that, for him, trouble had begun only a few days before, when Kosovo Liberation Army soldiers had searched a man in the woods nearby for...
When New Labour took office on 2 May 1997, supporters who had watched the Party’s rush to the right had already learned to put their faith in the God of Small Things. True, they sighed,...
On the evening of 10 March 1969, Richard Crossman, Harold Wilson’s new Secretary of State for Social Services (‘SSSS? Impossible!’ Crossman wrote in his diary), reached into one...
In London last month Benazir Bhutto called on Pakistan’s prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, to respond without delay to India’s nuclear tests. ‘It’s an opportunity for Pakistan...
For the first time I’m nervous flying to Belfast. It’s early morning, Friday 22 May, and radio reports tell of streams of voters heading to the polls. As I buy the Irish Times at the...
I was a blacklisted Hollywood fellow-traveller, a champagne socialist, a Pinko. Not that I wasn’t serious about my ideas and ideals. I was as serious as a 17-year-old arriving on the Coast,...
At Sunday mass in my North London parish there was recently imposed a ‘New People’s Mass’. It came suddenly and without warning. One week, we were all enjoying versions of the...
10 June 1993. Fellow-guests with Tony and Cherie Blair at a BBC dinner. Blair says immediately to my wife: ‘Weren’t you kind enough to ask me to a drinks party for Frank Field’s...
Plato is famous for having banished poetry and poets from the ideal city of the Republic. But he did no such thing. On the contrary, poetry – the right sort of poetry – will be a...
Ross McKibbin’s remarkable study of the way the cultures of class shaped English society has, at a stroke, changed the historiographical landscape. One learns more about almost any aspect...
Is there something in modern South Asia’s intellectual culture that prompts scholars to separate the private from the public lives of their subjects and deploy the public as a defence...
‘Martha Gellhorn (1908-98), war correspondent and heroine’. Since her death in February, this epitaph has become a depressing possibility. Now we can say what we like about her, but...
In 1957 Jennie Lee wrote a long letter, which she did not send, to her husband Aneurin Bevan, asking him to give her ‘a little self-confidence’. The end of the letter makes it clear...
For as long as I can remember, I had allowed myself to stand outside the umbrella that shielded or accommodated my contemporaries. Whether this was because I was genuinely different, objectively an outsider,...
On 11 March, 32 years after he directed the coup de force which brought him to power, President Suharto of Indonesia spoke the following words as he was sworn in for a seventh term of office:...
Sir, The quicker Richard Branson sells Virgin Railways and moves on the better. The last two occasions my wife has had the misfortune to use his wretched railway she has been 60 minutes and...
‘A species of fish too well known to require any description,’ reads the entry for cod in the Cyclopedia of Commerce and Commercial Navigation (1858). ‘It is amazingly...
When I was at school in the late Forties there were two sorts of painting on the walls. Most classrooms hosted a couple of pictures scarcely above the Highland-cattle level, and in terrible...