Back in Moscow again, surprised at how happy I am to be so, I sit in my old office and read myself into the ‘story’. For five years I followed its twists and turns, its lumpy,...
In the days of F.R. Leavis, English literary criticism was wary of overseas, a place saddled with effete, Latinate languages without pith or vigour. Proust is relegated to a lofty footnote in...
I thought about the dingy high-rises in Grbavica, the last Serb redoubt in Sarajevo, when I went back to Edinburgh and saw the grey wash over the buildings there and, in front of one tenement...
As Communism began to wear thin in the mid-Eighties, many Russians looked back to the tsarist period as grander and more Russian than the Jewish-Germanic system under which they had most recently...
In the 19th century, clientelism, bribery and vote-rigging were the only means whereby a weak state had been able to maintain its hegemony over a largely unmodernised society. Today sleaze takes more...
If you read the Clinton family profile ‘in neutral’, so to speak, you would imagine yourself studying a problem kid from a ghetto, where it is a wise child who knows his own father.
Someone was heard complaining, the other day, about the ‘absurd confusions’ of the recent war in the Balkans. Very well: but why absurd? Or when have such confusions been anything...
To go to Beirut just when Shimon Peres is doing his uniquely energetic electioneering both there and in southern Lebanon does not seem well-timed. However, a friend in Beirut says it’s...
In the spring of 1919 military staff at the United States Naval Training Station in Newport, Rhode Island, launched an investigation into the scope of ‘immoral conditions’ in the...
In 1950 a venerable, once highly successful, long-ailing magazine quietly expired. Richard Usborne, the assistant editor in its dying days, later recalled an aficionado’s touching reaction....
A Thatcherite history of the state in 20th-century Britain is simple: up until 1979 the state got bigger, clumsier, greedier; after 1979 it started to get smaller, nimbler, leaner. It is the...
Pat Buchanan’s season of success was brief, but respectable opinion in America and beyond is still shell-shocked by the appeal of his heretical economic ideas (protectionism to lift
In Politics and the Pound, Philip Stephens has produced a book which should be required reading for anyone aspiring to be either Chancellor or Prime Minister. Let’s hope Gordon Brown and...
Menachem Begin and his Likud union of nationalist and liberal parties won their first electoral victory on 17 May 1977, bringing to an end three decades of Labour rule. The Likud was to dominate...
The American Revolution is the subject of a rich and complex historical literature. In the 19th century, George Bancroft, the father of American historical writing, portrayed it as the...
The most remarkable aspect of the Scott Report is its simplicity. The famous length and the differing interpretations to which it has been subjected since its publication suggest a learned and...
Are judges flirting with ‘judicial supremacism’ by questioning the sovereignty of Parliament? Or are ministers flouting the rule of law, by interfering with judicial independence? Is...
In politics, Peter Mandelson and Roger Liddle explain for the benefit of their less worldly-wise readers, ‘getting your way can require a degree of intrigue and manoeuvring.’ The...