Tony Wood

At a time​ when relations between Russia and the West are at such a low ebb, it can be easy to forget exactly how much the two sides agree on. This is especially true in the realm of economic policy, where for years now the Putin government has been implementing its own version of austerity, designed to slim down Russia’s social welfare apparatus still further. The Russian term for it...

The Russians quickly realised that avenues for cooperation between Moscow and Nato were alternatives to membership, rather than stepping stones to it. When Putin asked Clinton at a 2000 summit how he would respond to Russia’s joining the alliance, Clinton apparently looked desperately to the advisers flanking him: Albright ‘pretended that she was looking at a fly on the wall’, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger ‘did not react at all’, so Clinton was reduced to saying he would ‘personally’ – a word he repeated three times, to be on the safe side – support it.

‘I didn’t cross​ the line, the line crossed me,’ a character in Yuri Herrera’s first book, Trabajos del reino (2004), remarks. In Mexico ‘la línea’ often means the border with the US, but in this case the words also refer to an ethical transition: the speaker is a former US law enforcement official who decided to throw in his lot with the...

Writing​ in 1973, the Mexican critic Carlos Monsiváis argued that, for a number of reasons, his country lacked a genuine crime fiction tradition of its own. For one thing, if Mexican crime writers were to aspire to realism, the accused would never be punished ‘unless he were poor’. In fact, ‘the identity of the criminal is the least of it’; the suspense would...

Nearly​ five thousand people have been killed in eastern Ukraine since April 2014; according to Ukrainian government figures, 514,000 have been internally displaced by the fighting, with another 233,000 applying for refugee status in Russia (9000 have sought asylum in the EU). Peace talks over the fate of the Donetsk and Lugansk regions have so far been fruitless, and the ceasefire nominally...