‘The situation in Gaza is dangerous, and the danger is that Hamas will take over and turn Gaza into “Hamastan” – into a kingdom of thugs, murderers, terrorists, poverty...
Earlier this year, the Chinese president, Hu Jintao, went on a 12-day tour of Africa. In Zambia he announced that China would build an economic co-operation zone in the country that would attract...
When units of the British army seized Basra in April 2003, they were gratified to find that the gates of the main prison (too heavy to be carried away by looters, apparently) had been made by a...
Contrary to their intention, commemorations of historical events are more often reminders of the power of forgetting: either official ceremonies that gradually lose their meaning, becoming public...
The 1960s skyscrapers of Caracas seemed uglier than usual. The Hotel Gran Melia wasn’t very appealing either. The kitsch ceiling in the giant lobby was reminiscent of the Dubai School (why...
On 21 December 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 was 38 minutes into its journey when it was blown up at 31,000 feet. The explosion was so powerful that the nose of the aircraft was torn clean off. Within...
Many Americans celebrate national holidays by mobbing megastores at dawn, pushing aside the slow-footed and grabbing the $39 computers, while TV crews film the spectacle and warn the indolent...
Complaints about the impact of economic globalisation are not new. On 9 December 1719, in response to the growth in cotton imports from India, the merchants and traders of Bristol submitted a...
Why do politicians write books? Sometimes money is the simple answer. Disraeli and Churchill were both scribbling before they entered Parliament, and Churchill ended with more than one small...
Now that Tony Blair has almost stopped hanging around the office poisoning the chalice for his inevitable successor, the season for political obituaries is wide open. Not that it hadn’t...
Had the Labour Party he led borne even a passing resemblance to the Labour Party we thought we had elected into government in 1997, we would not have had to endure the unnecessary and insulting...
Of all postwar institutions in the public eye, the United Nations has probably yielded the poorest literature. With the exception of two lucid studies of its foundation, Robert Hildebrand’s...
Colleges acted in loco parentis: female students were still required to sign out of their dormitories as recently as the 1960s, noting where and with whom they were going, and to observe curfews. Rules...
An elderly white man steps through his front gate on the allée de la Chapelle in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, ignoring the commotion two doors down, where a Haitian in his thirties...
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...