Politics is as much about losers as winners, which is why the defeated repay attention as much as the victors. The vanquished, moreover, are usually more candid. In their accounts the bruises...
As people struggle to work out what has been happening on the world’s financial and stock markets over the past few weeks, the two questions which seem to crop up most frequently are: why...
Give me chastity and continence, prayed the youthful Augustine, but do not give it yet. Perhaps the young Tony Benn, slithering up the greasy poll, made similar entreaties. For this, his...
In mid-August 1892, Hamburg was basking in a heatwave. Workers splashed around in the River Elbe, which reached an almost unprecedented 70°F. Then people started to go down with intestinal...
The history of thinking about political institutions and political behaviour has for two millennia oscillated between two opposed poles. Realists have seen politics in defensive terms: human...
Ariel Sharon is both hero and bogeyman: brilliant military tactician and rogue general, master both of the pre-emptive strike and of the cover-up, populist leader and – in the eyes of...
Of the various words which Gorbachev has used to describe his reforms, there can be no doubt which has had the most impact. Though perestroika (‘reconstruction’) conveys the intended...
As the Conference season ends and Parliament resumes, the Tories are in triumphant mood. The Alliance – even the name now seems to mock them – have disintegrated, no longer preparing...
Is the Chernobyl doorstop on its way? Surely it must be. I refer to the 1200-page, three-kilogram blockbuster which looms at you from airport bookstalls all over the reading world. Imagine the...
Until the end of last month, the peace accord signed between India and Sri Lanka on 29 July appeared, precariously and against the odds, to be holding firm. As I write this article, several...
When the Emperor Haile Selassie was removed from the palace in Addis Ababa 13 years ago, the Ethiopian revolutionaries chose to drive him away in a Volkswagen. It was in some sense an eye for an...
Late in July, well into the schools’ summer holidays, two copies of a consultation document entitled ‘The National Curriculum 5-16’ were delivered at the offices of the...
Ideologies – those ‘obscure metaphysics’, as Napoleon once angrily described them – are perhaps no less difficult to define than utopias. Whereas utopias are offered to us as images...
Imagine the following: some time in the autumn of 1945, a journalist arrives in defeated Germany. He is neither American nor British, nor does he have German or Jewish ancestry. He is objective,...
Foreign news organisations are not invited to operate in Saudi Arabia. The journalists who are permitted into the Kingdom by the Ministry of Information operate under severe constraints....
The Greater London Council was set up by the Conservative Government in 1963 because the old London County Council was redistributing wealth of every kind from the London rich to the London...
‘The 20th century,’ Charles Sabel remarks in his essay in the collection in honour of Albert Hirschman, ‘has been a gigantic lesson in the transformability of theories,...
The relationship between philosophy and Marxism has always been an awkward one. ‘Philosophy stands to the study of the real world in the same relationship as masturbation stands to real...