Recently, at Harvard University where I am based, a Jewish student, using an assumed (gentile) name, began posting anti-semitic statements on the weblog of the Harvard Initiative for Peace and...
On 5 March, Tony Blair gave a speech in his Sedgefield constituency in which he sought to justify his actions in Iraq by emphasising the unprecedented threat that global terrorism poses to the...
The bodies were still being collected, and the families had just begun their anguished search through hospitals and morgues, when Spanish embassies abroad received telegrams from their government...
Six months ago, as the number of guerrilla attacks and suicide bombings increased, an Iraqi friend in business in Baghdad used to comfort himself by saying: ‘The Americans cannot afford to...
In David Grossman’s 1998 novel, Be My Knife, an antiquarian book-dealer starts a passionate correspondence with a woman whom he has barely caught sight of across a room. The unlikely...
‘The table is full, the wall is painted, the space is filled with voices!’ Zurab was talking. We were in a Mexican-Japanese restaurant in Tbilisi, ending a heavy night. Bottles and...
There are two ways to look at the installation of James Baker, his father’s former secretary of state, in George W. Bush’s White House. Either the president has finally found a...
2 February 2004. There is nothing that has not been said. Some notes, though. Revealing, since his vanity was the main issue, were the settings in which Alastair Campbell chose to present...
The origins of state pensions are to be found in market failure. States have intrinsic advantages over companies as pension providers: because they have the power to tax, and are around for a...
On the night sleeper from Khabarovsk to Vladivostok I foolishly left my money belt in the loo. An hour and a half later, I realised I no longer had it with me. Panic. I was without passport,...
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...