Today is Thursday 7 July, a date which is likely, by the time this issue of the LRB is read, to have been abbreviated to 7/7, even if the atrocity in London proved a lot less horrific in its...
To encourage French voters to approve the treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe, President Chirac warned them against the risk of France becoming the ‘black sheep’ of Europe....
“When my father, Barrie Edgar, joined the BBC in 1946, its television service consisted of two studios at Alexandra Palace, and two outside broadcast units. Rising quickly from studio manager to the...
“Pilfering was rife. Millions of dollars in cash went missing from the Iraqi Central Bank. Between $11 million and $26 million worth of Iraqi property sequestered by the CPA was unaccounted for. The...
Robert Mugabe’s Operation Murambatsvina (‘driving out trash’) began on 19 May. Heavily armed militia, backed by helicopters and fighter planes, swooped down on a helpless...
The indigenous social movements of Bolivia have ejected another president, the second in less than two years. What they are asking for is a constitutional assembly and the renationalisation of...
‘Broadsword calling Danny Boy. Broadsword calling Danny Boy.’ Richard Burton could make any code name sound good. The character he plays in Where Eagles Dare, Major Smith, leads an...
In Kathmandu this March, I met a Nepalese businessman who said he knew what had provoked Crown Prince Dipendra, supposed incarnation of Vishnu and former pupil at Eton, to mass murder. On the...
You can tell you’re flying into Liberia because the world goes dark. An hour out of Banjul, lights on the ground disappear. Eighteen months into its first proper peace since 1989, after 14...
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the longest-serving president in American history – 12 years and a month. He won four elections and forged a Democratic majority that lasted into the 1960s....
The politics of taxation can sometimes be gripping for a nation’s citizens, but not often: the arguments tend to be too technical when they are true, and too obviously bogus when they are...
The three months it took to cobble together a government in Iraq after January’s election shows the depth of the divisions between the Shia, Sunni and Kurdish communities. In the north of...
Are our dealings with nature sustainable? Can we expect world economic growth to continue for the foreseeable future? Should we be confident that our knowledge and skills will increase in ways...
Is the United States an empire? Only in the US could such a question even be asked. To the rest of the world, the answer is obvious: the US is perhaps the most powerful empire the world has...
Labour has won its historic third term, by the majority (about 65) predicted by the much abused exit poll, and it has done so while receiving the lowest percentage of the vote ever won by a...
The right of the Palestinian refugees expelled in the 1948 war to return home was acknowledged by the UN General Assembly in December 1948. It is a right anchored in international law and in...
The 20th century, it’s said, taught us a simple lesson about politics: of all the motivations for political action, none is as lethal as ideology. The lust for money may be distasteful, the...
It’s late March, and I’m in downtown Beirut, escaping the sun to browse the books on politics in the Virgin Megastore. A stack of Michael Moore’s Dude, Where’s My Country...