Lenin’s ‘vanguard party’ of Marxist cadres, disciplined and ideally full-time, his ‘professional revolutionaries’, was the most formidable political invention of the...
Since the rise of Scottish Nationalism in the 1970s various prophets have foretold the imminent break-up of Britain. All too often, however, the signs and portents seem to have misled political...
The sky is never fully clear in Ibadan. A haze of pollution hangs above Nigeria’s third city. It is most visible in the morning, when the sun lights it from the side; lit from above, the sky...
Island race or not, we have not been doing at all well when putting out to sea in past weeks. First, in the benign setting of the Caribbean, the vice-captain and muscular icon of the England...
One morning a few months ago I put on a suit and went to Westminster to meet a senior Conservative MP. ‘We’re all on a journey,’ he told me when I asked whether his beliefs had...
For the last six months, a Scot reading the London papers, or watching London-made political TV shows, could only conclude that a sharp dislike of Scots and Scotland is spreading across South...
The prime minister made it clear that except where Her Majesty’s Government may decide that supreme national interests are at stake, these British forces will be used for the purposes of...
Not long ago I attended a lunch at which the guests were invited to discuss the Iraq debacle. It was deep in red-state America, but everybody present was an academic, and expressed due sentiments...
Since the LRB went to press with the last issue, climate change has made one of its periodic appearances in the headlines, with David Cameron and Gordon Brown each making announcements about what...
Universities contain rooms and buildings that academics never enter, such as boiler houses. At my university, Edinburgh, some of the meters in these boiler houses now have two roles: as well as...
‘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...