The rainy season arrived here on 27 October. As the first warm drops fell, the dusty ground gave out an unfamiliar odour, sweet, pungent and musty. Cars slithered on the slick roads, and soft...
Three years ago British ministers joined magazines like the Economist in proudly announcing that Britain was taking over from Germany as Western Europe’s miracle economy. Ours were dynamic...
In Britain, oppositions do not win general elections; the economy occasionally wins one for them. To prevent it doing so, governments in the second half of a Parliament devote much of their...
On 22 February 1965, the fifth month of Harold Wilson’s first ministry, Richard Crossman recorded the following in his Diaries of a Cabinet Minister: Then Harold Wilson raised the issue of...
Casual tourists from the West, travelling in air-conditioned buses and staying in modern government-sponsored hotels, may be pleasantly surprised by their first sight of Central Europe.* In what...
It is barely more than a year since the Poles installed their first non-Communist government for forty years. The anniversary of the breaching of the Berlin Wall is still to pass. Yet it is...
Like Wimbledon and the Proms, the annual ritual of the Party Conferences has been absorbed into our national life. The TUC Congress opens at the end of August, still good for seaside holidays and...
What has happened to ageing cannot be understood without comparing how things are with how things were before industrialisation, when society was to a considerable extent no more than the family...
Not so long ago, the most prestigious intellectual work, in the arts as in the sciences, was supposed to be impersonal. The convention was that the circumstances in which such work was produced...
Last month, two days after the war on the Reef between Inkatha and the ANC erupted in Soweto, the families in Klipspruit Extension were moving out. The windows had been smashed in every single...
I see that Ralph Dahrendorf has given us his reflections on the revolution in Eastern Europe.* Burke wrote his on the French Revolution to ‘a very young gentleman in Paris’ in order...
No political reputation has fluctuated, and been disputed, more violently than that of ‘Lord Grey of the Reform Bill’. Soon after his retirement in 1834 the Courier pronounced that no...
During the academic year 1982-83 Alain Besançon, a French specialist on Soviet affairs, became a visiting professor at the Hoover Institute in Stanford. He arranged with his Parisian...
A new plan for economic reform will shortly be decided on by the Soviet Government. It will be the fourth in less than a year: we cannot of course know whether it will last any longer than the...
‘Mustafa Adrissi, Idi Amin’s Vice-President, recently appeared before the Human Rights Commission in Kampala. In response to a question about the constitutional violations over which...
Disemplaning at Baghdad Airport a few years ago, I was met by a guide and interpreter who really did look like a retired torturer. Conducting me smoothly to my hotel (‘Are you a member of...
Anthony Eden should be living at this hour. He would hear the President of the United States say: ‘Half a century ago the world had the chance to stop a ruthless aggressor and missed it. I...
Much Green writing implies that in addition to a change of heart, the remedy would require strong political and economic controls. Herein lies the dilemma, for the idea of moving to a command economy...