In the early afternoon of Monday, 8 May, a sealed A4 envelope was delivered by the Iranian Foreign Ministry to the Swiss Embassy in Tehran. The wire agencies were told that it contained a letter...
South Lake Avenue in Pasadena, a few hundred yards from where I’m sitting, is named for the now dried up stream that once ran from the San Gabriel mountains to the Los Angeles basin. It was...
The price of a first-class stamp has gone up to 32 pence, almost 16 times what it was when the two-tier postal system was introduced in September 1968. The first first-class stamp cost 5d, a...
From left to right, the manifestos of all the Zionist parties during the recent Israeli election campaign contained policies which they claimed would counter the ‘demographic problem’...
Iraq is splitting into three different parts. Everywhere there are fault lines opening up between Sunni, Shia and Kurd. In the days immediately following the attack on the Shia shrine in Samarra...
Italy, like Britain, is a European democracy whose politics lean more towards the centre-right than the centre-left, although the long-term reasons for this are strikingly different....
Since 2001, Davos and Porto Alegre have been the twin cities of globalisation: Davos, the exclusive Swiss resort where the global elite of managers, statesmen and media personalities meets for...
At the time of the devolution referendum of 1997, doom-mongers feared that the Scots were about to join ‘a motorway without exits’. Separation from England seemed inevitable in the...
Is there a distinct social psychology of colonialism? Albert Memmi certainly thought so when he published The Coloniser and the Colonised in 1957. He was not the only one. Octave Mannoni’s
For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering...
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...