My first patient on Monday morning was ten minutes late. I was just about to call in my second when I saw that the first had just arrived. I hate it when this happens. The second patient will...
Rodric Braithwaite, British ambassador to Moscow between 1988 and 1992, was in Russia when Soviet troops crossed the Oxus into Afghanistan in 1979. His fascinating account of the Soviet...
Since the 1960s, social historians have made enormous efforts to expand the range of history beyond the familiar cast of monarchs, courtiers and parliamentarians to recover the lives of the lower...
The events identified with Tahrir Square have resonated in sub-Saharan Africa, and suggested a new way of doing politics: politics without recourse to arms. This has bewildered officialdom and...
The obliqueness of her position, her status as an outsider, gave her a freedom to think the un-thought, to force the unthinkable into the language of politics. I have long believed this to be one of feminism’s...
I took the train to Hasa today. The station at Dammam, near the Persian Gulf, is clean and spacious. But security dealt with me as though I was getting on a plane to Kandahar. Families with...
At first I thought: nothing’s changed here, nothing’s going to change. I spent part of my childhood in Greenock, and came back in 1999 to stand in next-door Port Glasgow as a...
Bashar al-Assad has many enemies outside his own country, but none of them wants him to lose power. He appears to have gained the upper hand against a two-month-old popular uprising, ensuring the...
In July last year, two months after assuming his duties as minister for universities and science, David Willetts granted university status to BPP University College of Professional Studies,...
The first anniversary of the coalition government has been and gone, and – like its members, no doubt – we have no clear idea of what its future will be. The various elections that...
I arrived in Dubai after midnight on 22 April, nervous about missing my connecting flight. Passing through security for the second time in nine hours, rehearsing the whole belt-discarding,...
At the heart of the Browne Report and the government’s higher education policy is a simple notion allegedly grounded in economics: that the introduction of market forces into the higher...
If the polls are right, the ANC will suffer its worst ever electoral reverse in the local elections due to be held in South Africa on 18 May. The main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance,...
What goes on in stock markets appears quite different when viewed on different timescales. Look at a whole day’s trading, and market participants can usually tell you a plausible story...
In the heyday of the labour movement, it was often observed that bosses needed workers but workers didn’t need bosses. Yet in the third and fourth quarters of 2010, corporate America posted...
On 11 April, four and a half months after he had been defeated in a UN-supervised election, Laurent Gbagbo, the former leader of Ivory Coast, was forced out of his presidential bunker by a motley...
‘Leave my brain alone,’ the dorky hero says in Peep Show, a Channel 4 sitcom, when mental fitness comes up: ‘I get my brain training from Sudoku and Alain de Botton’s...
At the time of writing, there is a stalemate in Libya. Towns such as Misurata and al-Baida, waypoints between Cyrenaica in the east and Tripolitania in the west, have been alternately in rebel...