The usual view of the ‘stans’, the five states that emerged in Central Asia after the Soviet Union’s collapse, is that they are a potential site of geostrategic rivalry: it is...
Future historians will record that, alongside its many other achievements, the coalition government took the decisive steps in helping to turn some first-rate universities into third-rate companies. If...
In all wars there is a difference between reported news and what really happened, but during the campaigns in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria the outside world has been left with misconceptions even...
I was infuriated by the title before I started the book. The problem is not with ‘republic’, though ‘oligarchies’ would be more accurate, but with ‘mafia’: an...
Wealth has brought disconcerting changes to Indonesia: large parts of Sumatra, ravaged by slash-and-burn investors, resemble a lunar landscape, and smoke from land-clearing fires started by palm-oil prospectors...
The things Russia’s dictatorship once depended on to give it an air of legitimacy no longer hold sway: the Kremlin needs bikers.
Dominic Lawson, writing in the Mail, thinks the way to understand Damian McBride’s relationship to Gordon Brown is by analogy with the Third Reich. McBride didn’t need to take direct...
The anti-government insurgency in Syria was given an intoxicating vision of triumph by the words Obama spoke in August 2011: ‘Assad must go.’
The reputation of Eugenio Pacelli, who reigned as Pope Pius XII from March 1939 until his death in October 1958, is an object lesson in the fragility of popularity and public esteem. Pacelli was...
The Australian Labor Party’s defeat at the polls on 7 September seemed likely long before the country had any sense of the opposition’s spending projections. Kevin Rudd and his...
Syria has for now turned into the war that never happened thanks to the gaffe that never was. Once John Kerry let slip that there was something Assad could do to head off a military strike...
Was 1979 the year that the myth of 20th-century secular progress started to unravel?
It is no longer fashionable to describe the events of 3 July in Cairo as a ‘second revolution’, but to describe them as a counter-revolution presupposes that there was a revolution in the first place.
In 1969 Norman Mailer ran for mayor of New York. He called for the city’s secession from the State of New York to become the 51st state; a ban on private cars in Manhattan; free public...
In April, members of the Egyptian Kefaya (‘enough’) movement and others who had been active in 2011 in the uprising to unseat Hosni Mubarak started a grassroots protest movement...
The single currency has turned into a monetary choke-lead, forcing a swathe of economies – more than half the Eurozone’s population – into perpetual recession.
Street fighting has its logic: despite the chaos, the tear gas and mayhem, there is a collective spirit, and something approaching order.
Plamen, a popular name for Bulgarian boys, comes from the proto-Slavic noun polmen, meaning ‘flame’ or ‘blaze’. At 7.30 a.m. on 20 February a 36-year-old artist called...