During the first 19 years of Israel’s statehood, its leaders gave little thought to the Palestinian question. Two-thirds of the Palestinians were driven out in 1948; those who remained were...
When they take my shoelaces and belt, I realise that this is more serious than I had thought. I am in a Manhattan precinct cell, early on a Sunday morning in August, having been stopped for...
Jean Suret-Canale, or Suret as everyone called him, was one of the finest Marxist historians and geographers of the last century. A pioneering Africanist, his books on Francophone Africa were...
Last month Mitt Romney arrived in Tampa persecuted for being a millionaire 250 times over, his status as a human the subject of national doubt.
The Alawites are one of several minorities in Syria, but they have always been seen as a special case.
The one thing most Europeans know about Belarus is that it has the most repressive political system and the most authoritarian ruler in Europe. The country’s parliamentary elections on 23...
Does it matter that the power Britain relies on to make the country glow and hum no longer belongs to Britain?
President Obama has waged war on al-Qaida by drone and by ‘kill list’. Vladimir Putin has hunted al-Qaida in the North Caucasus. The late Colonel Gaddafi, and now Bashar al-Assad,...
The one interesting thing about Mitt Romney is his nearly pathological absence of political savvy. Has there ever been a national candidate who has managed to alienate or outright insult so many...
Before he ran for the Socialist Party nomination in 2011 François Hollande was an identikit politician: son of a left-wing Catholic mother and avidly right-wing father, degree from...
On 11 August, Mitt Romney stirred excitement in a dull election by announcing that he would share the Republican ticket with Paul Ryan: a seven-term congressman, chairman of the House Budget...
Living originalism? The heart sinks. Is this going to resemble a treatise on secular spirituality or tabloid ethics or some other well-meant oxymoron? To a degree, the despondency is justified....
Why was it so easy for a few dozen sergeants and junior officers to topple the Malian government?
In the end, the Romney-Ryan ticket is running on a single platform: ‘We’re the white guys.’
The uneven rise of Scottish nationalism is deeply interesting: but not because it is hard to explain, or because it is the only domestic fracture that matters. It has long been accepted that...
The 1930s, the chronicler of American poverty Michael Harrington once said, ended in 1948, when the Cold War began to call into question the idea that democracy would lead to socialism. But by...
In Iraq, Bradley Manning came rapidly to feel that secrecy was a blight on everything he valued.
No one here expects Americans who have anything to do with politics to be mild-mannered and level-headed, so when Paul Krugman came to London in May to promote his book End This Depression Now!...