On 30 January, the day of the election, in Amara in the old marsh region of southern Iraq, the sheikh advances and smiles and hugs me and kisses me: once, twice, pauses and, as I am about to step...
The Institute of Economic Affairs is approaching its 50th birthday, and has much to celebrate. It was founded in the heyday of the so-called Keynesian consensus that dominated British political...
Like everybody else, I had read a lot about Harold Nicolson and his amazing marriage, but paid little attention to him as the author of many books, including a biography of his father, Lord...
My parents were militantly radical Dubliners working in Belfast when their first-born – me – came along. My mother, Celia, was vivacious, highly strung, something of an actress, both...
War is a chameleon, possessed of an infinite capacity to adapt itself to changing circumstances. But in adapting, it preserves its essential nature: brutal, capricious and subject to only...
I once had a teacher who was known for taking a more than professional interest in some of his pupils, especially the boys in the school cricket team. Too short-sighted to see an incoming cricket...
It was on the way up to Qalandya, on the edge of metropolitan Jerusalem, that I got my first glimpse of the separation barrier. In the neighbourhood of al-Ram, large sections of the wall that...
On the day of the election, 30 January, the streets of Baghdad were clear of traffic. Families, mainly Shias, drifted down the main road in the Jadriyah district to the polling stations near the...
What is Gladstone trying to tell us? Through the matted undergrowth of his prose, with its vatic pronouncements, its interminable subordinate clauses, its ponderous hesitations and protestations,...
In 2002, incoming students at the University of North Carolina were required to read Approaching the Qur’an: The Early Revelations by Michael Sells, a translation into English of 35 of the...
Where does it stop? The events at Abu Ghraib prison show no signs of vanishing into historical inertia. On the contrary, they seem to be replicating themselves throughout the defenceless body...
The autumn of the patriarch is finally over. These are difficult times for the Palestinians, and Yasser Arafat’s death presents them with a daunting challenge. The first of their...
In Tel Aviv, the windows of tall office buildings blaze all night long, conspicuously consuming. The brightest lights of Jerusalem, during Chanukah week, were those of a huge electric candelabrum...
Along the narrow tarmac road linking Kabul to Kandahar you could be in New Mexico: green valleys, with scattered trees turning orange and yellow; clusters of adobe-style walled compounds; and...
Revolution is a staircase. In February 1848, the poet Lamartine found himself in charge of a Paris revolution, from an upper floor in the Hôtel de Ville. He identified on the staircase...
When the fruit-sellers in the market in Tel Aviv shout ‘The boss has gone crazy!’ they mean that they are selling their merchandise at ridiculously low prices. In the world’s...
The polar bears stare forlornly at Hudson Bay. It’s late November and they should be out on the sea ice hunting ring seals, but the ice hasn’t formed and the bears are starving. Ursus...
A short film directed by Pasolini in 1966, La Terra Vista dalla Luna, opens with a caption printed over a fixed image: ‘Seen from the moon, this movie . . . is nothing and has not...