The last two years of sleaze have given the false impression that there is something new about the way in which this government now runs the country. In fact it has been an inefficient,...
The glistening heads of surface-to-surface missile systems are peeping out from behind their covers after three years of virtually uninterrupted hibernation. Their svelte nozzles are being...
Will Hutton, the Guardian’s economics editor, has produced a book which is part show-biz – it carries a passionate puff from Ian McEwan on the front cover and leapt straight into the...
On 24 September 1940, shortly after 9 p.m., those British radio listeners who had tuned their sets to 213 metres on the medium wave (a little higher than the frequency of the BBC Home Service)...
The Left has often looked to history for reassurance. It has sought to buttress its implicit faith in progress, of which history supposedly offered some kind of guarantee through simple...
This article by Robert Fisk was commissioned by the ‘New Yorker’, who subsequently declined to publish it on the grounds that it was too ‘polemical’ Selma Tawil brought...
The feudal system has usually been taken to entail a tenurial hierarchy in which land held of a superior carried certain obligations. In the resulting pyramid, only the man at the top could be...
In 1937 a small gas field was discovered near Whitby in Yorkshire. In 1943 in Nazi-occupied Holland drilling began in a search for gas which met success only in July 1959 when the Groningen field...
At around 9 p.m. on 9 December 1992 Nigel Bartlett was walking down a quiet suburban street near Wood Green in North London when a man began to follow him. The man – Bartlett said he looked...
It’s always surreal arriving at the annual four-day meeting of the Modern Language Association. You land at a distant airport, check into a strange hotel, and there in the lobby are all the...
‘The day will come, and perhaps it is not far off, when John Locke will be universally placed among those writers who have perpetrated the most evil among men.’ If Locke has a...
‘Cuckoo clocks,’ said the President. Orson Welles on the Prater Wheel slipped in and out of my mind. ‘Cuckoo clocks: the one area where the Swiss haven’t run us out of...
The Report of the Commission on Social Justice, Social Justice: Strategies for National Renewal, is not the first attempt since Beveridge to consider our social security system as a whole –...
Dan Jacobson grew up in the diamond town of Kimberley, South Africa. England was one of the places he looked to for inspiration. As it turned out, his interest in English literature and his habit...
The war which began in early December in Chechnya, the Russian republic in the North Caucasus, was a test of many things, but of Russia’s claim to be an open society in particular. Leaving...
After Napoleon won the battle of Waterloo, the former British colonies went to France. In due course, Australia was opened up by French settlement, with a British cultural residue which remained...
The foreign policy record of the Clinton Administration has been dismal. Even when the United States has shown more sensible and decent inclinations than Europe, as over Bosnia, the White House...
What happened in the 1994 Congressional elections was much more than the defeat of President Clinton and his post-leftist policies, though that it certainly was. And the election was much more...