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.
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?