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....
The West’s inability to put up a decent counterargument to al-Qaida is worrying.
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.
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...
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...
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...
When Allied and Axis planners began to imagine what the postwar world might look like, the economic chaos of the 1930s was uppermost in their minds.
On 4 April 2011, Juliano Mer-Khamis left the Freedom Theatre in Jenin refugee camp. A man came out of an alleyway, shot him five times, then walked back down the alley.
It’s happening again. The chairman has called on the distinguished representative of France. But what I’m hearing through a thick curtain of electrical hiss and crackle in the...
None of the stories we’ve been told about Meredith Kercher’s death really works.
I dreamed I was at an event to remember Frank Kermode and then found myself in the dark basement of a London restaurant, or rather a deep cellar adjoining a basement in which some kind of...
The question is not so much ‘Is Big Brother watching?’ but ‘How in hell can it cope?’
The usual view of the ‘stans’, the five states that emerged in Central Asia after the Soviet Union’s collapse, is that they are a potential site of geostrategic rivalry: it is...
Future historians will record that, alongside its many other achievements, the coalition government took the decisive steps in helping to turn some first-rate universities into third-rate companies. If...
In all wars there is a difference between reported news and what really happened, but during the campaigns in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria the outside world has been left with misconceptions even...
I was infuriated by the title before I started the book. The problem is not with ‘republic’, though ‘oligarchies’ would be more accurate, but with ‘mafia’: an...
Wealth has brought disconcerting changes to Indonesia: large parts of Sumatra, ravaged by slash-and-burn investors, resemble a lunar landscape, and smoke from land-clearing fires started by palm-oil prospectors...
The things Russia’s dictatorship once depended on to give it an air of legitimacy no longer hold sway: the Kremlin needs bikers.