Dominic Lawson, writing in the Mail, thinks the way to understand Damian McBride’s relationship to Gordon Brown is by analogy with the Third Reich. McBride didn’t need to take direct...
The anti-government insurgency in Syria was given an intoxicating vision of triumph by the words Obama spoke in August 2011: ‘Assad must go.’
The reputation of Eugenio Pacelli, who reigned as Pope Pius XII from March 1939 until his death in October 1958, is an object lesson in the fragility of popularity and public esteem. Pacelli was...
The Australian Labor Party’s defeat at the polls on 7 September seemed likely long before the country had any sense of the opposition’s spending projections. Kevin Rudd and his...
Syria has for now turned into the war that never happened thanks to the gaffe that never was. Once John Kerry let slip that there was something Assad could do to head off a military strike...
Was 1979 the year that the myth of 20th-century secular progress started to unravel?
It is no longer fashionable to describe the events of 3 July in Cairo as a ‘second revolution’, but to describe them as a counter-revolution presupposes that there was a revolution in the first place.
In 1969 Norman Mailer ran for mayor of New York. He called for the city’s secession from the State of New York to become the 51st state; a ban on private cars in Manhattan; free public...
In April, members of the Egyptian Kefaya (‘enough’) movement and others who had been active in 2011 in the uprising to unseat Hosni Mubarak started a grassroots protest movement...
The single currency has turned into a monetary choke-lead, forcing a swathe of economies – more than half the Eurozone’s population – into perpetual recession.
Street fighting has its logic: despite the chaos, the tear gas and mayhem, there is a collective spirit, and something approaching order.
Plamen, a popular name for Bulgarian boys, comes from the proto-Slavic noun polmen, meaning ‘flame’ or ‘blaze’. At 7.30 a.m. on 20 February a 36-year-old artist called...
Beltoon was told that the index finger of his right hand was the Shahadat, the digit of Allah, and that he must use this finger on the suicide vest to be sure of his place in paradise.
On 4 July, the day after the army overthrew Mohamed Morsi and suspended the constitution, I got an email from a friend in Cairo. A photograph of the 30 June demonstrations in Tahrir Square was...
How you punish a thief, in Plato, depends on the nature of the theft – and always on the status of the thief. The thing that’s stolen is also an issue. In the Laws a slave who steals...
Has Obama’s switch from a policy of detain and interrogate to a policy of kill on sight really followed an anti-liberal script written by Bush-era hawks?
Between 1975 and 1983, Luther Blissett made 246 appearances as a striker for Watford FC and scored 95 goals. When he joined the club they were in the Fourth Division. When he signed for AC Milan...
This piece was first published, with a different heading, on the LRB blog. You can read it here.