Returning to my native island of Jersey in the 1980s after a long absence, I found the island transformed into an offshore finance centre. The combination of deregulation and technological change...
If you’re feeling vulnerable in these cataclysmic times, stay clear of Lee Clarke, the Eeyore of American sociology and author of the forthcoming study of disaster, Worst Cases (Chicago,...
Hardly anybody went to Yugoslavia in 1954. The roads were bad, there wasn’t much food and it was almost impossible to get more than a transit visa. A few intrepid sorts went to Dubrovnik...
Little is required to ensure political quiet in the American scientific community. A bit of annual growth in government outlays for research, presidential medal-pinning ceremonies in the Rose...
When Nietzsche’s madman tries to proclaim that God is dead, he soon realises that his intervention is premature. Although his audience already think of themselves as atheists, the madman...
I had vowed never to go to China until my friend, the exiled poet Bei Dao, was able to travel freely there, but when I received a sudden invitation to the Century City First International Poetry...
‘W. stands for women,’ cried Barbara Bush, Laura Bush, Lynne Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Karen Hughes, Elaine Chao and Gale Ann Norton at the 2004 Republican National Convention, and in case the Good...
The schoolmaster William Johnson is remembered for three things, although not under that name. He wrote the most famous of all translations from Greek lyric verse, ‘They told me, Heraclitus,...
Palestinians celebrated as Israel began to withdraw its soldiers and settlers from the Gaza Strip (and from a handful of small and isolated colonies in the northern West Bank). The withdrawal...
In an increasingly remote region of cyberspace called USENET, a highly committed group of volunteers works to help people they’ve never met with computer problems. These problems might be...
Three of the suspects in the attempted bombings in London on 21 July were born in the Horn of Africa. One, Yasin Hassan Omar, was born in Somalia; a second, Osman Hussein, in Ethiopia; and a third,...
Suicide bombs blow up with the regularity of an artillery barrage in Baghdad. I no longer always go up onto the roof of the al-Hamra Hotel, where I am living, to see the black smoke rising and to...
After all, who didn’t go through the most improbable adventure during the civil war? Mikhail Bulgakov, Black Snow When a Lebanese wants your attention, he lowers his voice. You draw...
A lycée in Lyon, 1944. A young Polish refugee is hiding in the school. His identity papers are forged, and deportation to the death camps may await him if he is caught. His attention,...
‘The long walk to justice doesn’t end at Gleneagles,’ Noreena Hertz warned protesters just before the recent G8 summit. ‘It only begins there.’ The official parade...
It has become the odour of the age, flowers rotting in their cellophane wrappers. People began laying them on the steps of St Pancras Church the morning after the 7 July bombings, and within a...
True or false? 1. Suicide bombers suffer not from a sense of having lost their place in a community but from a sense that they have failed in their quest to find a new, Westernised form of...
In 1822 Giacomo Leopardi was finally allowed to leave home and visit Rome. He was 24. A child prodigy, he had spent his life in the remote town of Recanati in the Italian Marche, governed at that...