The government of Securitania deports some supposed enemies of the people and puts others under house arrest; public scrutiny of these measures in the ordinary courts is denied. Disruptive people...
News travels fast on the internet, and not always along the most predictable channels. Urban Dead is a sadly compulsive and hugely popular text-based MMORPG (massively multiplayer online...
On 4 February, the Board of Governors of the IAEA finally decided to report Iran to the UN Security Council. Their resolution noted that ‘after nearly three years of intensive verification...
Leo Amery, who lived and breathed the British Empire and could claim to have invented the Commonwealth, would doubtless find it sad that he is chiefly remembered for helping to bring down Neville...
Suppose 2005 had fulfilled President Bush’s fondest hopes. His intervention in Iraq was now successfully winding down, to reveal the first vibrant democracy in the Islamic world –...
Waking to find myself a touch genocidal, I would, I imagine, be uncertain how to proceed. An unprovoked attack on my target group with whatever weapon came to hand might take out a few of them,...
Ten years ago, I spent a couple of weeks working at a warehouse on one of Basingstoke’s industrial estates. Cardboard boxes full of glassware manufactured abroad would arrive in a shipping...
The alternative career fantasies of writers would make an interesting study: James Joyce dreaming of becoming the agent for Irish tweeds in Trieste, Thomas Mann musing that he would have made a...
There is a ‘reconstruction gap’ in Iraq. According to the US Special Inspector General for Iraqi Reconstruction (SIGIR), ‘in the coming year, the amount of money needed by the Iraqi government to...
The late Gardner Botsford was for almost four decades – from 1942 till 1982, with a couple of years off fighting the Nazis – an editor at the New Yorker. Among the many good things in...
The official US publication date of this portfolio of Catharine MacKinnon’s articles and speeches over the past twenty-five years coincided with the release of Inside Deep Throat, a...
That the next general election will be fought by Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Leader of the Opposition David Cameron we do know; but how it will be fought we don’t, in part because the...
In 2005 I heard that Coalition forces were camped in the ruins of Babylon. I heard that bulldozers had dug trenches through the site and cleared areas for helicopter landing pads and parking...
The exiled Trotsky began his biography of Stalin with the observation that the old revolutionist Leonid Krassin ‘was the first, if I am not mistaken, to call Stalin an...
Matthew Herbert’s Plat du Jour is an album of dance tracks united by the theme of food. Herbert has made a name for himself as a producer from collaborations with Róisín Murphy...
In 1977 Menachem Begin, then head of the Likud, created a revolution and removed the Labour Party from power. Begin’s was a social revolution, based on promises of social change and on...
Of the many graffiti to be found in the Paris banlieues just now – and creeping into the city itself – the most apt has surely been the simple injunction: ‘Riot!’ In...
Did Scooter Libby, Vice-President Cheney’s chief of staff, lie to a grand jury about Valerie Plame and the leaking of her name to the press? If he did, was it retaliation aimed at her...