Good Americans go to Paris when they die, but good Americans have always been few in number, so for a long time their impact on France was slight even when they were dead. ‘Who reads an...
When Sir Lewis Namier was lying on his death-bed, he is said to have looked up radiantly at his wife and declared: ‘What a pity! Yesterday was the first time I saw in my mind’s eye...
Last November, I returned to Berlin for the first time since the Wall came down. I had first lived there for six months in 1979. Within days of my arrival I’d been lucky to be accepted into...
Pessimism over Russia was not always as fashionable as it is now. Western commentators still refer automatically to the upheaval in the former Soviet Union as a ‘transition’, as...
Christopher Hitchens may not be ‘the nearest thing to a one-man band since I.F. Stone laid down his pen’, but he comes close. For the Sake of Argument records a life of action, of...
Conor Cruise O’Brien’s majestic study takes rise from two lines of Yeats: American colonies, Ireland, France and India Harried, and Burke’s great melody against it. The...
This impressive study of Victorian politics is built around a challenging thesis: that Gladstone, far from being the creator of the Liberal Party, was in fact a maverick who stumbled into the...
With the terminal decay of the Idea of Progress in both Whig and Marxist incarnations comes a growing recognition that much of what once seemed most characteristic of the modern world’s...
It was the patrician Alan Clark who most accurately summed up the approach of the British and American Governments to the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. Nothing, he reckoned, was better for business than...
On the matter of Russia’s future there can be no such thing as idle speculation. Now the Russian Prime Minister, Iosif Dozhdev, launches the New Economic Programme, eventually known to...
‘The Zapatistas a the best. Because they eat snake. They eat lion, and birds, like that one,’ whispered the little girl. She had come running up with a fistful of woven bracelets, the...
Vladimir Zhirinovsky is a lens through which we can see the character of contemporary Russians close up and grotesquely exaggerated. The Zhirinovsky glass reveals and enlightens like a Francis...
It was 30 December 1983, and the National Commission on the Disappeared had been set up by Presidential decree a few days earlier. Ernesto Sábato, Ricardo Colombres, Magdalena Ruíz...
Pablo Escobar, the world’s most famous drug smuggler, was finally found and killed by the Colombian police on 2 December 1993. Among journalists everywhere he was popular to the end. Most of...
Just outside Durban lies the vast black squatter camp of Inanda, whose huddling shacks house half a million people or more – the only way to perform a census is to take an aerial photograph...
We know all about Republican violence, about its worst excesses; in Britain, some people, maybe even most, know what the initials IRA stand for. I wonder how many could name the principal...
It was an extraordinarily long premiership – indeed the longest of the century by a considerable margin. In part, this was because the Opposition was divided, its members seemingly...
Televised images of horror in the former Yugoslavia have been confronting us for nearly two years now, and the term ‘atrocity’ has been widely used. Are the ‘atrocities’...