In Donetsk I had expected to find a totalitarian proto-state, and I did.
The latest assault on Gaza has given fresh impetus to calls to bring Israel to account at the International Criminal Court. Since the UN General Assembly recognised the state of Palestine in...
In the world of money, there is always an Official Worry List, containing the next big things which are likely to go wrong or blow up. The items on the list are sometimes problems we’ve...
Lasers are the latest tool for high-frequency trading.
Scotland has long been a nation. We shall soon find out whether its citizens now wish that nation to become a state. I hope they do. It will not only open up new opportunities for their own...
At the village of Khanqe, in Iraqi Kurdistan, tens of thousands of Yazidi refugees were living in rows of UN-issued tents. They had been driven out of their homes in Sinjar, sixty miles to the...
What is happening at Essex reflects on the one hand the general distortions required to turn a university into a for-profit business – one advantageous to administrators and punitive to teachers and...
It was nothing but questions for the bus party. We heard them all across Scotland, we asked them and we tried to provoke them. The bus party, a dozen or so of us, writers and musicians, had...
The frontiers of the new Caliphate declared by Isis on 29 June are expanding by the day and now cover an area larger than Great Britain and inhabited by at least six million people.
The opening ceremony is now a familiar occasion on which state-sponsored creativity can be given an enthusiastic public airing, most often in the company of expensive fireworks, assorted...
On 1 July 1916, Sergeant R.H. Tawney led his platoon over the top on the first morning of the Battle of the Somme, holding a gun to one young man’s head to get him to stop crying and keep...
For Hamas, the choice wasn’t so much between peace and war as between slow strangulation and a war that had a chance, however slim, of loosening the squeeze.
What happens when you set out to look the present in the eye but can’t quite bear the thought?
In 2004, a year before Israel’s unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip, Dov Weissglass, éminence grise to Ariel Sharon, explained the initiative’s purpose to an...
The European Union’s eastern frontier cuts through Selmentsi, a village on the border of Slovakia and Ukraine. On the Ukrainian side, the road leading to the checkpoint is lined with...
In many respects Isis is a very modern organisation. The brochure detailing its 2012-13 activities is like a state of the art corporate report.
The Shias’ feeling of disempowerment after the Mosul collapse has been so unexpected that they believe almost any other disaster is possible.
The first year and a half of Barack Obama’s second term has been preternaturally unlucky.