The most dramatic moment occurred the evening after Yom Kippur. We were sitting in the courtyard of Arafat’s Mukatah (compound): a group of Israeli peace activists and Palestinian friends....
The centre of the book trade in Baghdad is al-Mutanabi Street, which runs between the Tigris and Rashid Street, now shabby and decayed but once the city’s commercial heart. The bookshops...
“We have now entered the world of hotel and restaurant guides: some departments will have signs next to the entrance saying ‘HEFCE-commended’, while prospective students will decide whether they...
The California gubernatorial recall was launched by a group called the People’s Advocate, an anti-tax organisation operated by Paul Gann and Ted Costa, the alleged brains behind the 1978...
Will became an ardent public man, working well in those times when reforms were begun with a young hopefulness of immediate good which has been much checked in our days, and getting at last...
What can best be called clear water has started showing, happily, between the Blair regime’s incommensurate ambitions in respect of new weaponry and its chances of being able to realise...
There are different kinds of minorities. The notion of an Egyptian state for the Egyptians, a Jewish state for the Jews, simply flies in the face of reality. What we require is a rethinking of...
The first of these books is the product of an interdisciplinary conference at which literary critics and historians exchanged perspectives on a year conspicuous both for political conflict and...
When Robert Graves left Charterhouse School in 1914, the headmaster wrote in his report: ‘Well, goodbye, Graves and remember that your best friend is the wastepaper basket.’...
Most of the 18th-century political theorists with the biggest reputations come from rather out-of-the-way places, at least in geopolitical terms: Vico from Naples; Hume and Adam Smith from...
Among the more reasonable demands we make of our fellow human beings is that they treat us with respect. ‘Just a little bit’, as Aretha Franklin sang and sang again, seems to go a...
Frank Field has been Birkenhead’s MP since 1979. He was, for the first year of Blair’s Administration, the Minister for Welfare Reform in Harriet Harman’s DSS. Harman and Field...
Some aspects of the American political system can seem opaque and mysterious to the outsider. In particular, the Constitution, which British journalists regularly confuse with the Declaration of...
In February, two elderly men met in a Middle Eastern suburb and took afternoon tea. As old men do, they reminisced, chatted about their grandchildren and speculated on the perilous state of the...
There was a very good case to be made for Tony Blair’s handling of the Iraq issue. His critics never sufficiently acknowledged his efforts to play a difficult hand in a difficult game. He...
Here is the sort of thing that appals critics of the modern American entrepreneurial university. Members of the physics department invent an electronic gadget that looks like it might be useful...
If one thing is clear by now (and something has to be), it is that the machinery of government is not so much uniformly nefarious as multifariously uniformed: the left hand knows what the right...
When Major Henry committed suicide, Proust wrote that the Dreyfus Affair, hitherto pure Balzac, had become Shakespearean. While the Iraq affair obviously differs from Dreyfus, we can see what...