Just seventy years after Friday, 31 January 1919, when troops and tanks stood by to quell a mass rally, in Glasgow’s George Square, of West of Scotland workers campaigning for a forty-hour...
Many years ago, I was one of many journalists who set sail with high hopes in search of an undiscovered country called Wilsonia. It beckoned from afar across mighty oceans of investigations and...
In a few short months Margaret Thatcher will chalk up her first decade as prime minister. The celebrations to which this occasion will give rise in the mass media are certain to focus attention...
‘There is among the many departments of our well-ordered state a department which would be known if we were Chinese as “The Board of Things to be Known and Not to be...
Last year, a two-page circular letter from an address in Central London arrived in dozens of offices and homes throughout Britain. It was a handsome campaign document, announcing the appearance...
Eugen Weber, who contributes one of the essays to this interesting collection, writes of the way the Revolution became a national obsession in 19th-century France. The reason was, at least in...
When Thatcherism becomes a ‘wasm’, everyone will wonder what all the fuss was about. Abroad, the term means nothing, although there are probably one or two European politicians who...
Few countries were less promising for aspiring politicians than Syria in the Sixties. To begin with, the chances of merely staying alive during the political struggles were not high. Then, even...
Ahmed is a Palestinian living in the Bethlehem area. He is not yet thirty, but his studies were long ago interrupted by the closure of his university in the occupied territories and nowadays he...
A few years ago the present director-general of NEDO, Mr Walter Eltis, told me that in due course Keynes would simply be a footnote in the history of economic theory. If so, it will be a...
Some thirty years ago, as he ploughed through hundreds of pamphlets on the Anglo-American conflict published in the colonies before 1776, Bernard Bailyn was struck by the excitement with which...
When I returned to Moscow last June, it was clear from the start that the atmosphere of the place had changed considerably since my previous visit in the winter of 1985. Even the customs...
The fall of the Shah was an epic. His downfall had about it something of the Medieval morality play, even something of a Greek tragedy. It might have qualified as Shakespearian tragedy if the...
The membership of environmental organisations in Britain is double that of the political parties and three times that of Sunday worshippers in the Church of England. Each of us has some links...
‘Now we are just another European state,’ said a friend in Seville. ‘We are a country without ideals and beliefs. The passions have all gone. People are interested only in...
Nelson Mandela, incarcerated for over a quarter of a century, writes frequently to his wife, Winnie, about his vivid and often rather frightening dreams. I dreamt I was with the...
In his novels, the late Gwyn Thomas used to refer to those who frequented the pubs and cafés of small Welsh towns as ‘the voters’. It would certainly be the way to describe the...
Readers of my occasional contributions to the London Review who have consulted the Notes on Contributors will know that I earn my living as chairman of a public limited company rather than as an...