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...

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Putin’s Counter-Revolution

James Meek, 20 March 2014

Putin didn’t begin invading Ukraine to bring it back into the fold but to stop it escaping.

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How much meat is too much?

Bee Wilson, 20 March 2014

It isn’t so much that vegetarians remind us of the slaughterhouse as that they make a mockery of our unthinking preferences.

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Coalition Monsters

Colin Kidd, 6 March 2014

The pejorative associations of the term ‘coalition’ are deep-rooted in British politics.

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Short Cuts: Citizenship for Sale

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, 20 February 2014

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...

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Sisi’s Turn: What does Sisi want?

Hazem Kandil, 20 February 2014

Three years after its once inspiring revolt, Egypt has become a police state more vigorous than Nasser’s.

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What matters more: the leaker, or the leak?

Read more about Incendiary Devices: The Edward Snowden Story

Diary: Get Off the Bus

Rebecca Solnit, 20 February 2014

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.

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‘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,...

Read more about How worried should we be? How Not to Handle Nukes

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...

Read more about Little People Made Big: In Love with the Cause

Hazards of Revolution

Patrick Cockburn, 9 January 2014

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?

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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...

Read more about Mandela: Death of a Politician: Mandela, the Politician

Short Cuts: Arafat’s Tomb

Eyal Weizman, 9 January 2014

Yasser Arafat is not the only leader whose body has recently been exhumed. South America has seen a wave of exhumations of political leaders who died in debatable circumstances....

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Bunches of Guys: Just the Right Amount of Violence

Owen Bennett-Jones, 19 December 2013

The West’s inability to put up a decent counterargument to al-Qaida is worrying.

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Whose sarin?

Seymour M. Hersh, 19 December 2013

Barack Obama did not tell the whole story when he tried to make the case that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack on 21 August.

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Diary: Sistema

Peter Pomerantsev, 5 December 2013

There are any number of paths and initiations into sistema, the liquid mass of networks, corruptions and evasions which has ordered the politics and social psychology of Russian civilisation since tsarist...

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At the CHOGM

Sadakat Kadri, 21 November 2013

Sri Lanka’s authorities are in buoyant mood. As Prince Charles prepares to open the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Colombo, the Defence Ministry is helping to organise...

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Short Cuts: Cooking for Geeks

John Lanchester, 21 November 2013

When Ferran Adrià, the Spanish maestro who is undisputedly the most influential chef of the last two decades, gave up cooking at his restaurant El Bulli, he announced that he was going to...

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