The trend in most industrial societies is away from the public funding of pensions and towards private, commercial provision. Robin Blackburn describes the finance companies selling pension...
Fifteen months ago in these pages I reviewed a book by Khidhir Hamza, who called himself ‘Saddam’s bombmaker’. At the same time I assessed the now notorious government dossier...
“If Gilligan’s broadcast was so terrible, if the Blairs were having sleepless nights as a result of being accused of deceit, if the prime minister was shunned at home and abroad as a liar, the law...
At the end of last year, when the commission appointed by Jacques Chirac to look into the health of secular values in France delivered its recommendations, no one was surprised to hear that a ban...
Robin Cook’s memoir concentrates on the first two years of the second Blair government, from his ‘demotion’ to leader of the House immediately after the 2001 general election to...
On a Friday afternoon near the start of the first term, seventy students go up to the dissection room. Next door, there’s a cloakroom with metal pegs and benches. We dump our bags and take...
The central dynamic of global politics since 11 September 2001 has been the profound shift in the nature of American foreign policy. After the end of the Second World War, the United States...
If we follow the logic of Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, we could say that Rupert Murdoch is not so much a man, or a cultural force, as a...
Perhaps it is the rain. The gaggle of BNP protesters standing behind the crowd-control barrier on Tottenham High Road are very subdued. They are almost to a man – they are all men –...
‘Satan’s Grotto’ was the caption to the picture of Saddam Hussein’s hidey-hole on the front page of the Sun the day after the ex-dictator was captured by American forces....
Even though we live in an age of intensive and intrusive media coverage, TV viewers in Israel were lucky to catch a glimpse of the meetings that produced the Geneva Accord. The clip we watched in...
At first Dickens tried to deny that Harold Skimpole, the parasitical aesthete of Bleak House, had been based on his friend Leigh Hunt; but later he confessed, not a little proudly, that the...
In 1995 Michael Howard, the Tory Home Secretary, dismissed Derek Lewis from his post as Director General of the Prison Service and appointed David Ramsbotham Chief Inspector of Prisons. Lewis...
On the morning of 17 April 1998, the Singapore merchant ship Petro Ranger set sail carrying 9600 tonnes of diesel and 1200 tonnes of Jet A-1 fuel for delivery to Vietnam. Three hours beyond...
In June 1994, Bill Clinton came close to launching a ‘pre-emptive strike’ against North Korea’s nuclear reactors at Yongbyon, about sixty miles north of Pyongyang. Then, at the...
By 1995, there were 37 monuments and 113 plaques dedicated to Jean Moulin in France; 978 boulevards, avenues, streets, squares, bridges and stadiums were named after him, as well as more than 365...
Im`pro.vise, v.t. & v.i. 2. to make, provide or do with the tools and materials at hand, usually to fill an unforeseen and immediate need; as he improvised a bed out of leaves. Webster’s...
It is partly because so much appears to be known about William Cobbett (1763-1835) that he is insufficiently understood. Few political writers anywhere and at any time have been more prolific or...