Every Tory attempt at ‘renewal’ – the staged leadership election last summer is a good example – pushes the Party closer to the abyss. Every poll indicates that they are...
In the early Seventies I began work on an analysis of the British Parliamentary élite which made very evident both the decline of direct working-class representation among Labour MPs and the...
Liberals and democrats are fearful about next month’s elections in Russia. Their expectation since 1990 – when Boris Yeltsin became leader of Russia’s Parliament – had...
Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated earlier this month by a right-wing extremist claiming to act in the name of God, inflicted more punishment and pain on the Palestinians than any other Israeli...
I came to live in Dublin when I was 17, in October 1972. It was very exciting. The annual fee for an arts student at University College Dublin was £100. Someone from home told me that he...
Who was Gyp? A woman of many names: a sign, suggests Willa Silverman, of her often-expressed unhappiness with her identity, and especially her sex. She was born Sibylle de Riquetti de Mirabeau in...
Oldest among its European competitors, the Portuguese transcontinental empire lasted the longest, collapsed the fastest, and left the most bloodshed and ruin behind it. It owed its durability to...
This is one of the bravest and most important books to come out of South Africa in several years: as an exercise in truth-telling it bears comparison with Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s...
One-thing-at-a-time pragmatism is the hallmark of good old Anglo-Saxon common sense: systemic connections between diverse spheres of human life are the teutonic vice of the likes of Sombart and...
Twenty years after her death, and nearly half a century after The Origins of Totalitarianism established her international reputation, Hannah Arendt looms larger than ever – as a...
Wednesday, 27 September 1995 was not a day lacking in newsworthy events. A rogue Japanese trader had out-Leesoned Leeson by losing a billion dollars on Wall Street without his employers noticing;...
‘Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live!’ Mayakovsky’s words became one of the most quoted Soviet slogans and remained so for decades. And they were not entirely devoid of...
One of the ideas about China still often held by people in England is that China is full of bandits, and it seems worth offering a bit of out-of-date reportage on this topic; there is no moral...
‘Tahiti Nui’ is a sad song. It’s been going through my head the last few days in Marie Mariterangi’s voice – a sad throaty, Tauamotuan voice, stilled for ever now by...
In 1949, when many of China’s citizens were running from the newly-victorious Communists, Dr Li Zhisui returned to his homeland. He had been making good money as a ship’s doctor with...
The troubles at the LSE go back a long way. Perhaps they began on the day in July 1894 when Henry Hutchinson shot himself, thus activating the terms of the will that he had made. A loyal if...
The collapse of the satellite Communist regimes of Eastern Europe and the subsequent disintegration of the USSR were supposed to mark the triumph of the liberal democratic ideal and the market...
Throughout the Cold War, the British Army poured most of its resources into training and equipping for ‘the big one’, the day the Red Juggernaut would come rumbling across Europe and...