Diary: What about Somalia?

Stephen Smith, 11 February 1993

Reflecting on Somalia at the recent UN-sponsored peace talks, I found the more I heard about warring factions, Western intervention and the re-drawing of boundaries, the more I felt like...

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Diary: In Sarajevo

Sean Maguire, 28 January 1993

One soldier I met told me that there was an 80 per cent chance of getting killed in Otes. A Bosnian-controlled village in a thin straggle of then unconquered territory on the western fringes of...

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Nationalising English

Patrick Parrinder, 28 January 1993

Last September, at the very moment when hundreds of thousands of teenagers began to follow the first GCSE courses under the National Curriculum, the Education Minister John Patten infuriated the...

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How Left was he?

Paul Addison, 7 January 1993

John Maynard Keynes is famous for his private life and associations with Bloomsbury and famous, too, as the economist who campaigned for public works between the wars, and revolutionised...

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Lutfi’s bar will not be opening again

Basil Davidson, 7 January 1993

North beyond Sarajevo is where the hills of Bosnia become less grey and gaunt than they are elsewhere, and a little further north again they slope away to the plain of Semberija along the Sava...

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Letting things rip

Wynne Godley, 7 January 1993

This book brings together the ‘most important academic papers and journalism’ of Professor Tim Congdon, described in the blurb as ‘one of the City’s most well-known...

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Diary: In Moscow

John Lloyd, 7 January 1993

Let us suppose that Russia is no less a democratic state than any usually referred to in this way; let us, that is, overlook the fact that its democratic periods resemble the tiny windows set in...

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What do we mean by it?

J.G.A. Pocock, 7 January 1993

This volume is one of a series. Professor Burns has already edited the Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought: c. 250-c. 1450 (1988), Dr Goldie is to join with Robert Wokler in editing...

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Dirty Money

Paul Foot, 17 December 1992

When the Bank of Credit and Commerce International was closed down on 5 July 1991, a million people throughout the world lost their deposits. Many of the losers were from the Third World; small...

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The Koreans and their Enemies

Jon Halliday, 17 December 1992

Over the past year evidence has been emerging that the Japanese kidnapped more than 200,000 young women into sex slavery during their occupation of East Asia. Those so enslaved were termed...

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Diary: On the Future of the BBC

John Naughton, 17 December 1992

The notion that the BBC is independent of the government of the day is one of those quaint constitutional myths by which Britain is governed, like the doctrine of ministerial accountability or...

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Poor Khaled

Robert Fisk, 3 December 1992

Prince Khaled bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, commander-in-chief of all foreign forces in the Gulf War, nephew of King Fahd, and son of the Saudi Defence Minister, Prince Sultan, used to employ an...

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Post-Nationalism

Geoffrey Hawthorn, 3 December 1992

For the past thirty years, New Left Review has been the most consistently interesting political journal in the country. And Perry Anderson, who used to edit it and still helps direct it, has been...

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One for water, one for urine

Stephen Smith, 3 December 1992

I had that Terry Waite in the back of the car once. Unlike the celebrity fares picked up by Private Eye’s proverbial taxi-driver, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s special envoy was...

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Maastricht or no Maastricht

Peter Clarke, 19 November 1992

When a Government loses the confidence of its own nominal supporters it is plainly in a bad way. There is a good deal of difference, however, between a chronic malady and a terminal collapse. The...

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Diary: Art Talk

Tim Hilton, 19 November 1992

Have you read Glen Matlock’s I was a teenage Sex Pistol? In its own way this is an enlightening book and I like the manner in which the words appear, splattered in a typeface that’s...

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In a narrow pass

Derek Hirst, 19 November 1992

Stephen Sedley and Lawrence Kaplan seek to map a new course for the post-socialist Left, and to turn attention away from that beguiling but now exploded theme, egalitarianism. The long fixation...

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Why Georgia matters

John Lloyd, 19 November 1992

By Soviet standards, the town of Sukhumi was a place of real pleasure: arranged about a crescent bay of the Black Sea, the climate warm even in October, with seaside hotels and restaurants. Those...

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