A historian ought to know better, I suppose. But for the last decade – ever since I passed a long queue of anxious depositors outside a branch of Northern Rock in September 2007...
If, faced with fundamental environmental challenges, Keynesianism is reaching its ultimate limit, will it end with a whimper or a bang?
In the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War, my New York City primary school, like every other school in the city, held weekly practice drills to prepare us for being bombed by the Russians....
A short book could be written about British prime ministers and Zionism. It might begin in 1840, when Lord Palmerston, foreign secretary and prime minister-to-be, received a letter from...
According to recent estimates by India’s National Crime Records Bureau, every 16 minutes a crime is committed by caste Hindus against an untouchable – or Dalit, as they prefer to be called. The figures...
Thomas Sankara, the revolutionary leader of Burkina Faso, was shot dead in the presidential buildings in Ouagadougou on 15 October 1987. I was the West Africa correspondent at the time for...
‘The United Kingdom played a major part in drafting the convention,’ said the Blair government’s paper introducing the bill that became the 1998 Human Rights Act, ‘and...
In The Passions and the Interests, published in 1977, Albert Hirschman revisited the 18th-century argument that the pursuit of worldly self-interest might be the most effective way of...
‘OK, we’ve been speaking for an hour and fifteen now, so you have a choice. Either we go to questions from the audience, or we carry on for another 45 minutes. It’s up to...
We went to see the Bayeux Tapestry the other day. In January, Emmanuel Macron promised to lend it to Britain, so it seemed worth taking the children to visit it in Normandy before it got...
The tug-of-war between the two sides of Obama’s sporting personality – the team leader and the loner, the dreamer and the realist, the man who thinks anything is still possible and the man who has...
The road to Raqqa, once the de facto Syrian capital of Islamic State, looks surprisingly pastoral. As we approached the city across the plain north of the Euphrates we had to stop the car...
Late last month, the US House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee approved the latest version of the Israel Anti-Boycott Act, which is now one step closer to becoming law. The...
The African university began as part of the European colonial mission, a precursor of the one-size-fits-all initiatives that we associate with the World Bank and the IMF. And so it continued, until decolonisation.
The Colombian presidential election last month was won by Iván Duque of the Democratic Centre (DC) party with 54 per cent of the vote. Álvaro Uribe Vélez – the...
During his presidential campaign last year, Emmanuel Macron’s insistence that he was ‘neither left nor right’ was seen as the defining feature of his attempt to transcend...
Remember that remark made by Robert Lucas, the macroeconomist, that the central problem of depression prevention had been solved? How’s that been working out? How it’s been working out here in the...
Since last summer, nearly 700,000 Rohingya have fled western Myanmar to Bangladesh. The Myanmar military began its sweep of villages on 25 August in response to attacks on police outposts by...