Owen Bennett-Jones

BBC managers have become a national joke. The problem is structural. Many start out as capable and engaged producers but they can only win promotion by showing ever greater degrees of editorial caution. By the time they reach senior positions, many view the journalists beneath them as lazy, editorially unreliable malcontents. The lack of respect is reciprocated by the journalists.

Historians​ of Northern Ireland have plenty of material to work with. A book called Lost Lives (2001) records the lives and deaths of each of the 3720 people who were killed during the Troubles. Fighters, activists, officials and politicians on all sides have spoken to the media and written books themselves. Public inquiries have published hundreds of pages of hitherto secret evidence....

Jeremy Greenstock​ was the UK ambassador to the United Nations during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq and then the special envoy for Iraq, based in Baghdad during the occupation. Obviously he wrote his memoirs with a view to having them published. Mistakes had been made in Iraq and there was public interest in what knowledgeable insiders had to say about them. But he also accepted his...

Al-Qaida’s leadership has in large part been drawn from the elite and professional classes. Islamic State is more of a working-class movement whose leaders have roots in Iraq’s Sunni communities, and it has been able to play on the sectarian feelings of underprivileged Sunnis who believe the Shia elite has excluded them from power. These underlying tensions are likely to be exposed when the Iraq army and Shia militias take back the city of Mosul from Islamic State, which they hope to do by the end of the year. Some of the city’s Sunni population, however much they resent Islamic State, will come to miss the caliphate when the city is liberated.

Largely​ because 15 of the 19 hijackers involved in the 9/11 attacks were from Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism is often cited as the fountainhead of violent jihadism, but that is to make too much of its significance compared to other Islamic movements, some of them little known in the West. The distinction between Shias and Sunnis is widely understood, and more recently the mainstream press has...