‘One night in Miami,’ Raymond Williams wrote in 1973, ‘still dazed from a week on an Atlantic liner, I began watching a film and at first had some difficulty adjusting to a much...
‘Where has all the ice gone?’ Joe Immaroitok asked. It was 24 October last year, and he was staring at Foxe Basin. A shallow expanse of ocean the size of England, the basin usually...
As you speed down the freeway from JFK towards the Manhattan skyline, it is easy to overlook a long, low, neoclassical building that stands by the lake in Flushing Meadow. Built for the 1939...
Tony Blair’s political career (assuming his interminable delay actually ends in departure) is difficult to assess. He has been, electorally, the most successful British prime minister of...
Moisés Naím identifies a new connection between world economics and world politics: ‘Global criminal activities are transforming the international system.’ This...
The drive to Grozny from Nazran, in neighbouring Ingushetia, takes about an hour and a half. We speed past a cluster of Russian soldiers at the roadside while we are still in Ingushetia; shortly...
If global warming is as much of a threat as we have good reason to think it is, the subject can’t be covered in the same way as church fêtes and county swimming championships. I suspect we’re reluctant...
The ghost of Montesquieu is haunting Britain. His theory of the separation of powers famously misdescribed the political dynamics of 18th-century England, which was already moving in the...
I am an Israeli patriot, and I do not feel that I need anybody’s recognition of the right of my state to exist. If somebody is prepared to make peace with me, within borders and on...
At the climax of the last of the great Stalinist show trials in the late 1930s, Andrei Vyshinsky, the Soviet prosecutor general, declared that the ‘masks’ had been ‘torn...
If any of us has seen the places in the developing world that Mike Davis catalogues remorselessly in Planet of Slums, it was probably from an aeroplane. That doesn’t always mean 35,000...
The similarities between Iraq and Darfur are remarkable. The estimate of the number of civilians killed over the past three years is roughly similar. The killers are mostly paramilitaries,...
Suppose you believe that a central aim of public policy in a democratic society should be improving the welfare of its citizens. Even when resources are plentiful, this is a challenging task...
Baghdad is now effectively a dozen different cities; they are all at war. On walls there are slogans in black paint saying ‘Death to Spies’. A Shia caught in a Sunni district will be...
In the mid-1980s, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was a parish priest working in an impoverished and embattled district of Port-au-Prince. He became the spokesman of a growing popular movement against the...
When I was in Harare recently I inquired about an old naturalist I’d known there. He knew he had cancer, had told his friends he’d finished his book, was all through and would like to...
I was still at Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv when my mobile rang. Rottem, the head of the news department, asked me how I was doing. ‘They opened up my belly last night,’ I grumbled,...
Nicholas Orme’s Medieval Schools is something of a capstone on a long scholarly career devoted to the history of education, running from his English Schools in the Middle Ages (1973) to