The arrival of bluetongue in eastern England in the late summer of last year was not a surprise. There were large outbreaks of the virus among farm animals in Belgium and the Netherlands, close...
Regis Debray has led the fullest of lives, embroiled in ideology, controversy and action. As a young man at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, he sat at the feet of Louis Althusser; he trained...
African oil is sweeter and lighter than Middle Eastern crudes and in recent years it has begun to look increasingly desirable. For political reasons, it became especially attractive after 9/11,...
Does Britain need a written constitution? Of course it does, which is why, as Anthony King points out at the start of this readable and illuminating book, it has one already. Whatever its...
The breaching of the barrier between Gaza and Egypt by Gaza’s imprisoned population dramatised two fundamental realities about which Israeli and US policymakers have been in complete...
Publishers love moaning. The piles in Waterstones are too big, the number of titles stocked too small; advances are too high, supermarket prices too low; TV steals readers, except when it...
The voters queuing outside the Olympic Primary School in Nairobi’s Kibera slum on 27 December were sure of two things. First, that if a free and fair election were held, Raila Odinga and...
The US defence and intelligence community launched a pre-emptive strike at George Bush and Richard Cheney on 3 December. The new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) released that day concluded:...
‘To ask me to check my Christian beliefs at the public door is to ask me to expel the Holy Spirit from my life when I serve as a congressman,’ declares Mark Souder, a conservative...
If you want to know what is happening in the mind of the average teenage boy you must follow the action of his thumbs, because the eager digits that might once have flicked through the pages of
Between 1946 and 1964, a period known as La Violencia in Colombia, a proxy war between mostly peasant partisans of the Liberal and Conservative Parties resulted in so many deaths that, in order...
19 June. After two years of negotiations with the Ministry of Defence in their new, fortified Whitehall headquarters, I was finally on a plane, in my eye-catching blue body armour and helmet, on...
At the point when we bought our house in 1996, average house prices in the UK, adjusted for inflation, were some way below the levels they’d hit in the late 1980s bubble. Clapham was then...
Gordon Brown, like all prime ministers, like all politicians, like all of us really, is over-reliant on the advice of a small group of people he thinks he can trust. In Brown’s case, these...
Condoleezza Rice, like everyone else, is ‘worn down and discouraged by the war’, the New York Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller writes in her new biography (Random House, $27.95)....
In 2004, with the re-election of George W. Bush, the Republicans seemed invincible. Bush’s consigliere, Karl Rove, interpreted the election as the sign of a realignment and pushed for a...
Arranged marriages can be a messy business. Designed principally as a means of accumulating wealth, circumventing undesirable flirtations or transcending clandestine love affairs, they often...
‘Nothing Dr Bew writes is without interest.’ The wearily Olympian judgment was delivered by a distinctly peeved F.S.L. Lyons, doyen of historians of modern Ireland, when faced 27...