Those who discovered Salammbô at an impressionable age, before reading any conventional histories of the Punic Wars, know how difficult it is to shake off Flaubert’s intoxicating...
This book attracted a lot of attention when it first appeared in the US in May because it apparently showed Israel offering to sell nuclear weapons to apartheid South Africa. That happened some...
State-building isn’t working, and it isn’t for lack of trying. The European and American countries that go by the name ‘the international community’ have poured expertise,...
The leprous spawn of scattered Israel Spreads its contagion in your English blood; Teeming corruption rises like a flood Whose fountain swelters in the womb of hell. Your Jew-kept politicians buy...
Very few of those who voted Lib Dem or Conservative, and very few of those elected as Lib Dems or Conservatives, imagined that five days after the election there would be a Con-Lib coalition...
In 1834 a spectacular fire destroyed the House of Commons. No one was sorry. More than 60 years later Gladstone still remembered the building’s lack of ‘corporeal conveniences’:...
For Tony Judt What is a collective passion? And is it something we should want, or get excited about? Today the political climate across the Western world is marked, we are told, by a curious...
Lunching with a friend I notice that the adjoining table is occupied by an elderly gentleman with a vaguely familiar face and three younger companions. He smiles and nods. As lunch proceeds,...
To begin at the beginning: what was the story with Cleggmania Mark I? Was it just a dream? It is a truism of political science that what happens in election campaigns doesn’t make any real...
When Oxford University Press commissioned Ross McKibbin to write the volume in the New Oxford History of England covering the years 1918 to 1951, they got more than they bargained for. McKibbin...
On 6 October 1981, President Anwar al-Sadat attended a parade to mark the anniversary of the crossing of the Suez Canal in the 1973 war with Israel. It was also an occasion to display the...
They hunted dogs with guns, the Berliner said, to clear the streets for the Olympics. He was in Hackney now, an architect, but he had been in Athens in 2002, when the deals were going down and...
On Sunday 21 March the House of Representatives passed a healthcare bill that had been promoted for a year and brokered in many particulars by Barack Obama. This marked a victory for a...
We should give thanks for Melanie Phillips, who writes for the right in a column for the Daily Mail here in the UK, and now has a book out in the US with Encounter Books (other new titles: How...
John Lanchester's article in this issue was made up of four posts from his election blog (Smell the Glove / North Korean Flavour / How to Break the System / End of the World).
In 1957, Boris Shragin, a young art historian, accompanied a group of foreigners on a visit to the Moscow studio of Aleksandr Gerasimov, the president of the Soviet Academy of Arts. Gerasimov had...
There is an eerie thrill to be had from walking through the home of a deposed president. Legitimate trespassing. Private vice exposed. By the time we came to gawp on Saturday afternoon, three...
When Isaac Deutscher was writing his great three-volume biography in the 1950s, Leon Trotsky was a name to conjure with. The first volume came out in 1954, a year after Stalin’s death and...