I never thought I would see this opera again. ‘Rule Britannia!’ peals, the curtain parts, and there is a mad queen poling her island raft away into the Atlantic.
Ever since the fall of the Ottomans, the Kurds have been a non-state nation, an insurgent population split across four sovereign states – Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Iran. Denied, as they...
Underlying tensions are likely to be exposed when the Iraq army and Shia militias take back the city of Mosul from Islamic State, which they hope to do by the end of the year. Some of the city’s Sunni...
Theresa May’s long tenure (six years) and apparent comfort at the Home Office suggests that its view of the world, as a dangerous and frightening place, may have deepened in her case or meshed with...
In his recent book, The Question of Scotland: Devolution and After (Birlinn, £9.99) Tam Dalyell, for many years the Labour MP for West Lothian, identifies several points at which the...
‘Hey, everybody, how about it, huh?’ Paul Ryan said, coming onto a stage decorated with hay bales and pumpkins in Elkhorn, Wisconsin, on the afternoon of 9 October. ‘Man,...
Did the Rwanda genocide happen because a few army officers and politicians, squabbling over whom they should appoint as leader, casually used mass murder as a means of obtaining a temporary...
It took four years for the Colombian government and the Farc – the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – to reach the peace agreement signed earlier this year. President Juan...
Across Syria towns and districts are under siege. In the north, the Syrian army and its Shia allies from Iran, Iraq and Lebanon, assisted by Russian air power, have surrounded the opposition...
At the moment of its American birth, ‘international relations meant race relations.’ Races, not states or nations, were considered humanity’s foundational political units; ‘race war’ – not...
Women ‘There’s nothing I love more than women, but they’re really a lot different than portrayed. They are far worse than men, far more aggressive, and boy, can they be smart!’
‘As a land-user thinketh, so is he,’ the American conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote in his essay ‘The Land Ethic’ in 1948. People needed to ‘quit thinking about...
From January, there will be a new chief inspector of schools: Amanda Spielman, the secretary of state’s choice, whose appointment was confirmed in the face of fierce opposition from the...
Two contradictory thoughts now dominate the Anglo-American approach to feelings in the context of public debate. For the speaker, feelings must be restrained – a neutral style of rational euphemism...
The careers of politicians do not always end when they were supposed to. The Duke of Portland resigned as prime minister in 1783, only to have another, more successful go at governing 24 years...
Aldekerk is a village near Germany’s post-industrial Ruhr Valley, but it’s all immaculate half-timbered houses and shivering lace curtains. I went there last May and when I arrived...
Warships are built for war, but not only for war. They have always had an eloquent symbolic value as expressions of power, wealth and resolve, as instruments of threat or reassurance. They...
In 1987, the free-market economist Gary Becker proposed selling the right to live and work in the United States. For $50,000 potential residents, especially the rich and successful, could leap...