The golden era of Ukrainian national identity was not tsarist Russia but the first decade of the Soviet Union.
The last time I was in Odessa my passport was stolen. It was the summer of 1995, and hot. Odessa, sometimes called a mini-Petersburg on account of its handsome 19th-century centre, was a ruin....
The full extent of US co-operation with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar in assisting the rebel opposition in Syria has yet to come to light.
Whatever the outcome of the independence referendum in Scotland this September, it will be followed by an extensive inquest into the workings of the British constitution. In some quarters...
The strongest local resistance to Putin’s annexation of Crimea has come from the peninsula’s Muslim minority. The Crimean Tatars, 12 per cent of the population, largely boycotted...
In the years that preceded the uprising, Assad and his intelligence services took the view that jihad could be nurtured and manipulated to serve the Syrian government’s aims.
Anglophone ancient historians have never had much time for Marx. They tie themselves in knots to avoid class-based analyses, recasting what can look an awful lot like class in terms of...
Putin didn’t begin invading Ukraine to bring it back into the fold but to stop it escaping.
It isn’t so much that vegetarians remind us of the slaughterhouse as that they make a mockery of our unthinking preferences.
The pejorative associations of the term ‘coalition’ are deep-rooted in British politics.
Last November Joseph Muscat, the prime minister of Malta, flew to Miami to convince several hundred lawyers, accountants and wealth managers of the virtues of a Maltese passport. New...
Three years after its once inspiring revolt, Egypt has become a police state more vigorous than Nasser’s.
What matters more: the leaker, or the leak?
Silicon Valley workers want to inhabit the anti-war, social-justice, mutual-aid heart of San Francisco, but to do so they often displace San Franciscans from their homes.
‘Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.’ That’s known as Murphy’s Law. It’s invoked in all sorts of settings, but its natural modern home is in engineering,...
Werner Schwieger, one of Maxim Leo’s grandfathers, hung out a big swastika banner after Hitler came to power. But he couldn’t get his father-in-law, Fritz, to accept one: Fritz was a...
Why have oppositions in the Arab world failed so absolutely, and why have they repeated in power so many of the faults and crimes of the old regimes?
In the early 1990s, after more than four decades of stringent enforcement, South Africa ceased to be a country where races were segregated by law. Yet no one in a position of power was called to...