The frontiers of the new Caliphate declared by Isis on 29 June are expanding by the day and now cover an area larger than Great Britain and inhabited by at least six million people.
The opening ceremony is now a familiar occasion on which state-sponsored creativity can be given an enthusiastic public airing, most often in the company of expensive fireworks, assorted...
On 1 July 1916, Sergeant R.H. Tawney led his platoon over the top on the first morning of the Battle of the Somme, holding a gun to one young man’s head to get him to stop crying and keep...
For Hamas, the choice wasn’t so much between peace and war as between slow strangulation and a war that had a chance, however slim, of loosening the squeeze.
What happens when you set out to look the present in the eye but can’t quite bear the thought?
In 2004, a year before Israel’s unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip, Dov Weissglass, éminence grise to Ariel Sharon, explained the initiative’s purpose to an...
The European Union’s eastern frontier cuts through Selmentsi, a village on the border of Slovakia and Ukraine. On the Ukrainian side, the road leading to the checkpoint is lined with...
In many respects Isis is a very modern organisation. The brochure detailing its 2012-13 activities is like a state of the art corporate report.
The Shias’ feeling of disempowerment after the Mosul collapse has been so unexpected that they believe almost any other disaster is possible.
The first year and a half of Barack Obama’s second term has been preternaturally unlucky.
When Ray Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans, ordered the city to evacuate for Hurricane Katrina on 28 August 2005, two days later than he should have, he exempted hospital staff. There were 2500...
Piketty is one of the very few contemporary economists eager to revive the old-fashioned spirit of political economy.
The Palestinians who were forced out of their homes in 1948 were not regarded by Israel as refugees. That would have implied that Palestine was their country, to which they would have the...
Thirty years ago, disembarking at the airport in N’Djamena, I knew within moments that the calcination of desert sand produces a dust of such pungency that it wipes all previous data...
My objection to private education is simply put. It is not fair. And to say that nothing is fair is not an answer.
Thailand’s political crisis is a sorry tale of bad losers and a broken political system. But it is also an old-fashioned, 20th-century-style class war.
There has been much hand-wringing, even a sense of political panic, since the European elections. ‘Anti-establishment’ parties now occupy – so it’s said – a third...
When Putin’s holy war began Alexey checked himself into a psychiatric ward. He had come back to Russia in 2012 after working as a journalist in London, where we met (I had just moved to...