During a summer school on the theme of parties and democracy held at the European University Institute in Florence last September, the talk turned to political corruption, as it often does when...

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Good for Business: The End of Research?

Ross McKibbin, 25 February 2010

In January last year a directive from John Denham, secretary of state in what was then the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, announced that research funding for universities was...

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Nodding and Winking: Françafrique

Stephen W. Smith, 11 February 2010

‘Sorry, but it’s no longer the way it used to be. There’s nothing more I can do for you. Under Bongo Senior, this would have been unthinkable. But Bongo Junior doesn’t...

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Significance Addicts: Aid Workers

Michela Wrong, 11 February 2010

As a member of Nairobi’s press corps, I often used to socialise with aid workers. The Kenyan capital was a perfect base for us. Its air links meant Africa’s various trouble spots, our...

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Sinomania

Perry Anderson, 28 January 2010

These days Orientalism has a bad name. Edward Said depicted it as a deadly mixture of fantasy and hostility brewed in the West about societies and cultures of the East. He based his portrait on...

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Diary: Mrs Robinson Repents

Anne Enright, 28 January 2010

Iris Robinson is, at the time of writing, under acute psychiatric care in a Belfast hospital, after a BBC Northern Ireland documentary revealed that she had, at the age of 59, solicited...

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Bendy Rulers: Amartya Sen

Glen Newey, 28 January 2010

At some time in the past the idea took hold that social justice was all about the state’s hoovering up resources and then blowing them at needy or deserving recipients. Some of these...

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Anwar Awlaki’s Blog: In Yemen

Theo Padnos, 28 January 2010

Three days after Major Nidal Malik Hasan, an army psychiatrist, murdered 13 of his colleagues at the Soldier Readiness Center in Fort Hood last November, Anwar Awlaki, an imam with whom he had...

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Short Cuts: Terrorist Databases

Daniel Soar, 28 January 2010

One effect of the failed Christmas Day underpants bombing on NW Flight 253 to Detroit was to reveal how hard it is for counterterrorism bureaucracies to know, or do, anything about anyone. A...

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At the height of the Brezhnev period, when the Soviet system seemed politically secure and economically stable, a new theory emerged to excite the hopes of Kremlinologists: that Islam would be...

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Happy Campers: G.A. Cohen

Ellen Meiksins Wood, 28 January 2010

‘Socialism’, Albert Einstein said, is humanity’s attempt ‘to overcome and advance beyond the predatory phase of human development’, and for G.A. Cohen ‘every...

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Sinking by Inches: Ireland’s Recession

Anne Enright, 7 January 2010

Last year, the Society of St Vincent de Paul spent €6.1 million giving people in Ireland food. This year, it says that requests for food are up 50 per cent, that calls in general are up 35...

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Short Cuts: Kraft eats Cadbury

John Lanchester, 7 January 2010

When economic times are hard, big companies take the opportunity to eat smaller ones. This process does not respect national boundaries, particularly when an economy is as open to outsiders as...

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Social Work with Guns: America’s Wars

Andrew Bacevich, 17 December 2009

By escalating the war in Afghanistan – sending an additional 34,000 US reinforcements in order to ‘finish the job’ that President Bush began but left undone – Barack Obama...

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I Could Fix That: Clinton

David Runciman, 17 December 2009

In the final year of the last century, George Stephanopoulos, Bill Clinton’s one-time aide and press secretary, published a memoir of his time in the White House entitled All Too Human: A...

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Town Planner? Engels

Miles Taylor, 17 December 2009

The best of friends started as the closest of rivals. When Marx first met Engels in 1842 he immediately disliked his theology, his military uniform and the company he kept in the beerhalls of...

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Omar al-Bashir seized control in Sudan in 1989; Idriss Déby entered N’Djamena, the capital of Chad, the following year, with Bashir’s approval. The two men belonged to a new...

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Past Its Peak: The Oil Curse

Robert Vitalis, 17 December 2009

In 1905 a British journalist called James Dodds Henry travelled to Baku, an enclave on the southern frontier of the Russian Empire that had recently become the centre of the world oil industry....

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