Is living through a process enough to know it, if you don’t know how others experience it? Those in the middle of historical events most people only know from TV can feel they missed the...
In theory, a redesigned Franco-German engine could run better, but look more closely at what the engineers have in mind, and the motor is more likely to stutter.
Labour’s problem is not that it has become too left-wing, but that Corbyn can’t express these policies in a way that appeals to a sufficiently large part of the electorate and allays their anxieties.
Talk with Brexit enthusiasts for long enough and you begin to perceive the outlines of an unusual political philosophy. It makes use of the concepts you would expect – freedom, equality,...
The British government’s Prevent programme, clumsy and laughable on so many levels, is extraordinarily efficient on others. It divides Muslims (practising or not) from the rest of society; black or...
After Brexit, the public face of criminal justice will look much the same as it does now. The UK has resisted many of the European Union’s moves towards harmonisation of substantive...
The place is in ruins. A mangled refinery is now a playground, municipal buildings and schools have been flattened, but the people keep moving, and the killers – insurgents, soldiers, militias, bandits...
R.W. Johnson is a long-standing contributor to the LRB. His first appearance was on the letters page in 1981, where he took ‘mild issue’ with a review of his most celebrated book,
Timothy Snyder, a historian of Modern Eastern Europe at Yale and the most rhetorically gifted defender of the anti-Russian US foreign policy establishment, must have been rubbing his eyes in...
To restrain the competitiveness of German industries in order to save the single currency, as outsiders sometimes suggest, would from the perspective of the unions be committing suicide for fear of death.
When Donald Trump pledged, during his presidential campaign, to ‘begin building a wall’ along the US-Mexican border he was promising to create something that already existed. At...
How to explain Poland’s swing against the European Union? How to explain the election of the Catholic fundamentalist, authoritarian, populist, Eurosceptic Law and Justice Party to rule a...
Inevitably, the first thing I did when I got my copy of the one-volume edition of The Benn Diaries (Hutchinson, £30) was to look up Jeremy Corbyn in the index. He appears about as often...
A friend who lives in the North and works in an EU-funded community centre in the South said she fears the return of the border to the minds of the people. The old questions. Who are you? Where are you...
Reactions by the international commentariat to Trump and Netanyahu’s joint press conference on 15 February focused largely on Trump’s pronouncements, specifically on what seemed to...
More often than we may realise, and in sometimes quite shocking ways, we are still using Greek idioms to represent the idea of women in, and out of, power.
Defeat, for the left, is once again a badge of honour. It may also be a relief. Hollande has bequeathed nothing for a new administration of the left to build on.
In his monumental biography of De Gaulle, Jean Lacouture describes a meeting of the Free French in London in 1941 at which several of the younger members expressed their admiration for...