This is the second part of a three-part article. Part 1: ‘Who Will Lose?’; Part 3: ‘Who Lost?’ With three down and one to go, it’s clear that the 2008 debate...

This is the third part of a three-part article. Part 1: ‘Who Will Lose?’; Part 2: ‘Has Anyone Lost Yet?’ There’s an old adage about American presidential debates:...

One of the most striking things about the reaction to the current financial meltdown is that, as one of the participants put it: ‘No one really knows what to do.’ The reason is that...

In a famous essay, one of the most acute self-critical reflections to emerge out of any of the youthful revolts of the 1960s, Murat Belge – a writer unrivalled in his intelligence of the...

The College of Art and Design in Lahore is one of the most cultured institutions in Pakistan’s most cultured city. When I visited a couple of months ago, it was surrounded by sandbags: a...

My friend Robbie’s always had a bit of a thing about guns. In a country like South Africa this is difficult to avoid. A murder rate of roughly four hundred a week and a rape every 26...

Judged by the amount of money directly dependent on it, the British Bankers’ Association’s London Interbank Offered Rate matters more than any other set of numbers in the world. Libor...

Is it possible, Quentin Skinner asks, that an entire tradition of political thought, including the most influential conception of freedom in anglophone political theory in the past half-century,...

This is the first part of a three-part article. Part 2: ‘Has Anyone Lost Yet?’; Part 3: ‘Who Lost?’ This year’s presidential race is the first not to include a...

‘The greatest single truth to declare itself in the wake of 1989,’ J.G.A. Pocock wrote two years afterwards, is that the frontiers of ‘Europe’ towards the east are...

The helicopter service to Freetown from the airport at Lungi was suspended; it had crashed one too many times. That meant I would have to take the ferry, across the neck of one of the world’s...

In 1964, Harold Wilson described the record of the (outgoing) Conservative government as ‘13 wasted years’. If the present Parliament lasts its full term – as seems likely...

The conflict in South Ossetia has produced a cloud of rhetoric that seems to have grown in inverse proportion to the intensity of fighting on the ground. Once the outcome became clear – a...

Barack Obama was lucky in the timing of his visit to Iraq. He arrived just after the prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, had rejected a new Status of Forces Agreement which would have preserved...

At the time of the parliamentary elections in Serbia earlier this summer, the possibility that Radovan Karadzic, once the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, might be handed over to stand trial at The...

Unlike the oil ‘shocks’ of the 1970s, the current energy crisis is almost certain to be long-lasting. None of the quick fixes proposed by pundits and politicians – drilling in...

As Barack Obama never tires of saying, America is a country where ‘ordinary people can do extraordinary things.’ In January 2006, Neil Entwistle, a seemingly ordinary 27-year-old...

For a moment in the late 1990s, it looked as though mobile phones might make us free. You could work in the park, be available when you wanted to be, choose who you answered to. You could be...