This is a strange time in Iraq. Local actors and regional powers are watching each other and the Americans, waiting to see what the US election will bring. For their part, the Americans are...
In the courtyard of Steam Baths Number Four, on Astashkina Street in Odessa, there are two marble plaques with bunches of flowers laid on the ground beneath them. The first is engraved with the...
When I was a student in the 1960s I wouldn’t shop in Sainsbury’s because they sold South African wine. After I married, my father-in-law in South Africa said: ‘You’ve got...
The modern history of English secondary education begins with the 1944 Education Act, usually known as the Butler Act. It was, for better and worse, the most important piece of education...
When David Davis, the shadow home secretary, announced his resignation as an MP on 12 June – in order to fight a by-election for his own seat on an issue about which he was in total...
On the final night of the relentless presidential primary campaign, Jesse Jackson compared Barack Obama’s victory to the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Erica Jong compared...
Ireland today is the place you are most likely to be happy. Your desire for a robust and rising standard of living, political freedom, strong bonds with your extended family, a marriage that...
The American occupation of Iraq is going much the same way as British rule after the First World War, when an easy military victory led to over-confidence and a conviction that what Iraqis did...
A building at Al Kibar in eastern Syria was attacked by Israeli aircraft early on the morning of 6 September last year. After the raid the Syrian authorities bulldozed the site, presumably to...
In 1997, the Princeton economist Paul Krugman wrote an article entitled ‘In Praise of Cheap Labour’ in the online magazine Slate, suggesting that those concerned about conditions in...
In the mornings, there is a clinging, overripe smell that some people say drifts in from the countryside, a folk memory of what these clipped green acres used, so recently, to be. Mulch of market...
Why do these scandals always break when a leader takes a step towards peace, or pretends to take a step towards peace? The main thrust of the current establishment is towards occupation, expansion and...
In 1617, Ottaviano Bon went to France as one of two Venetian ambassadors charged with negotiating a peace with the Habsburg archdukes of Graz. Having made concessions beyond their instructions,...
One of the first words I ever heard at school was ‘Bethlehem’. For the pupils at St Winnin’s Primary in North Ayrshire it was infinitely more familiar than the word...
The American philosopher John Dewey thought that democracy should be like a giant conversation: the nation talking to itself about its hopes and fears and listening to what other people have to...
If you had asked an 18th or 19th-century Englishman about his country’s constitution, you would not have got the baffled look you get today. The belief that a constitution is a document and...
‘Don’t ask me how I am,’ a colleague said to me when I arrived at the office yesterday morning. ‘You know how bad things are here now, so please don’t ask.’...
Boubacar Bah, a 52-year-old tailor from Guinea living in Brooklyn, is one of 71 detainees to have died in the last four years in the custody of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. An illegal...