Like other beliefs and forms of behaviour to be met with in this country in the course of the present century, much of the Thatcherite approach to social policy was imported from the United...
Sari Nusseibeh, Professor of Philosophy at Bir Zeit University, a leading Palestinian intellectual and political activist, was arrested by Israeli Border Police at his home in the West Bank...
In my 29 years as a Member of the House of Commons, I can recollect only one occasion when I have broken out in a cold sweat of anxiety. It was on a Saturday morning, at home, when I was shaving...
Can you tell the difference in principle between these two leaks? In 1983, a young civil servant at the Ministry of Defence was so outraged by her Secretary of State’s plans to head off a...
Mayor Ron Nachman has some dramatic photographs of the last Scud attack on Tel Aviv. He wants to show them to me; he wants me to understand what they mean. ‘Come and look at this,’ he...
South Africa still holds a morbid fascination for outside observers, despite the competition from more old-fashioned Arab autocracies. An astonishingly smooth experiment in social engineering...
Perez Zagorin’s suggestion that the 16th and early 17th centuries, the era which encompassed the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, might aptly be described as the Age of...
Shortly before the last election, a cabinet minister made an indiscreet prophecy over lunch. After Mrs Thatcher, he said, the Conservative Party, like a great river, would return again to its...
The response of the girl on Passport Control at Heathrow was typical. ‘Where have you just come from, sir?’ she asked as she took my passport ‘Bogota,’ I replied....
In the twenty stagnant years between the Prague Spring and the Eastern European revolutions of 1989 there were two conduits for intellectual contact between intellectuals in Eastern and Western...
Mexico, Mexicans sometimes say, is too far from God and too close to the United States of America. The same could be said of the whole of Latin America. Ever since the declaration of the Monroe...
The ‘question of leadership’ which is the subject of both these books is the question of how much difference leadership in politics can make. Contrary to what is held by believers in...
The other wall, the mote famous and aesthetically more distinguished one, the one designed to protect China from the barbarians, inspired Kafka to one of his most profound reflections: ‘Try...
The view from the roof of the Governor’s office in Khorramshahr was uninterrupted. The city appeared to possess no other building with two storeys intact. Over the road, beyond the sentries...
The most renowned historian of his time. Fernand Braudel owed his international reputation to the two great volumes on the Mediterranean in the age of Philip II which he published in 1949, and to...
It was night when we reached the banks of the Tigris. A huge full moon burned like a false sun in the open sky. In the moonlight I could make out the trees and bushes of Iraqi Kurdistan two...
No Iraqi atrocity seized the public imagination more vividly than the charge that in the days following the 2 August invasion of Kuwait Iraqi soldiers murdered at least 312 prematurely born...
‘Not to know Goethe,’ A.W. Schlegel wrote poetically, ‘is to be a Goth.’ Nicholas Boyle begins the preface to Volume One of his biography of the great man by stating,...