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...
In June 1999, a housewife and mother of three was pulled over by the police at a stop sign in St Paul’s, Minnesota and addressed by a name she hadn’t used for 25 years. Kathleen Ann...
Mosul, said by some to be modern Iraq’s second and by others its third most populous city, was originally awarded to France as part of Syria under the infamous Sykes-Picot Agreement....
Dictatorship and renovation may both be precipitated by crisis, but whereas the former is to be deployed as sparingly as possible, the latter is to be encouraged, for institutions last longer if they retain...
There is no great mystery about the Republican victory in the US election. It was the product of what used to be one of the most familiar and powerful combinations in the modern history of...
The Great War seems far off, the world before 1914 even further. We find it hard to believe that men and women cheered in the streets as Europe lurched towards war that July, that the men who...
Kabul, since 1776 the nominal if forever ignored capital of Afghanistan, hides itself within thousands of forbidding walls. Mounds of ancient brick race up hillsides, remnants of the...
There’s a handy website, http://tinyurl.com, that shrinks very long web addresses into very short ones. This is useful when sending hyperlinks by email, as they can get broken up on...
The swagman he up and he jumped in the water-hole, Drowning himself by the coolibah tree, And his ghost may be heard as it sings by the billabong, Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me?