Mumtaz Hussain Qadri smiled as he surrendered to his colleagues after shooting Salman Taseer, the governor of the Punjab, dead. Many in Pakistan seemed to support his actions; others wondered how...
One aspect of Tony Blair’s memoir was under-celebrated when it was published last year: its remarkable handling of style.* For a 700-page book that was written in a hurry, A Journey’s...
A month after she left the State Department, Condoleezza Rice signed a three-book deal, reportedly for more than $2.5 million. The first volume is the story of her childhood, about the parents...
Reading this Life of Lloyd George is like watching one of those old James Cagney movies where it’s established early on that the protagonist isn’t simply an anti-hero but, for all...
For the institutions that claim to represent ‘the international community’ – the Western press, international NGOs and UN agencies – the armed conflict in the Democratic...
In 1667, the Royal Society’s first historian described the early Restoration as ‘this Age of Experiments’. He was advertising the society’s new scientific programme and he...
Only someone badly lost would find himself driving through a village as unremarkable as this, I’m thinking. The lights are on in the post office, but the parking lot is empty: no one, I...
In one of the diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks Putin and Medvedev are compared to Batman and Robin. It’s a useful analogy: isn’t Julian Assange, WikiLeaks’s organiser, a...
Candia McWilliam is six feet tall and used to being stared at. She always looked ‘a bit thick’, she says, ‘where thick overlaps with apparently sexy’: a mixed blessing for...
Freedom, in the words of the old Irish nationalist song, comes from God’s right hand. As with the gift of divine grace, it puts its recipients on the spot. Are we in a fit state to receive...
A ‘progressive’ system means, broadly speaking, that some people pay more than others for the same benefit, on the grounds that they can afford to, just as some pay more taxes, both...
When American politicians are caught having illicit sex – like Eliot Spitzer, who resigned as governor of New York in 2008 after it was revealed that he was using a call-girl when he went...
In the late 1960s, George Bush Jr was at Yale, branding the asses of pledges to the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity with a hot coathanger. Michel Foucault was at the Societé française...
The stately dome and columns of University College London are dominated by a bedsheet banner proclaiming its occupation and the grey stone is scrawled with coloured chalk: ‘Cut Out Cuts:...
On the eve of the Liberal Democrat Party Conference in September the armed forces minister, Nick Harvey, a Lib Dem, told MPs that ‘the government had decided in principle to renew...
Last month’s release of US diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks raised some eyebrows in France. Le Monde, one of the selected press outlets in the latest syndication, posed as the honest,...
During 2009, it was difficult to find anybody inside the newspaper business who was not profoundly depressed about the future of the industry. All the trend lines were downwards. The migration of...
In a hung parliament, should the MPs who hold the balance of power side with the party that came first in the election, or the party that came second? The reason for going with the winners is...