That Assad’s government is on its last legs has always been something of a myth.
There is no shortage of turning points in Russia’s 20th-century history, from the October Revolution of 1917 to the German defeat at Stalingrad in February 1943, to the overnight...
Many of the sins that Haitian officials are accused of – dishonesty, incompetence, lack of transparency – are manifest in their accusers’ own practices.
Can places, like people, have a personality, a set of things you can love or not love? Do countries speak? Do lakes and mountains offer a guide to living? Could you feel let down by a city? Can...
The rhetorical torrent which began issuing from the state media in late March was unexpected in its intensity, but none of what followed has been inconsistent with past North Korean behaviour.
I was walking down Great Russell Street a few weeks ago when a young man emerged from a house wearing sandals, khaki trousers, a backwards University of Tennessee baseball cap, and a yellow...
Three years ago, the Bank of England set out to calculate a figure that does more than any other to shatter banking’s preferred image of itself.
Before I went to Cyprus it seemed to me that ordinary people hadn’t done too badly in the rescue of the Cypriot financial system.
Margaret Thatcher is the third most written about person in the ‘LRB’ archive, after Shakespeare and Freud. Here Karl Miller’s memories of the paper in her day are accompanied...
Since his exile from Russia, Berezovsky had been the ultimate bogeyman, hauled out whenever the Kremlin wanted to pin the blame on someone.
Facebook may have started as a way to rank one woman’s hotness over another’s, but it has been quick to produce its first feminists.
Margaret Thatcher is the third most written about person in the ‘LRB’ archive, after Shakespeare and Freud. These are some of the things that were said.Servicemen are starting to...
None of Egypt’s key actors has the power to consolidate a new regime, or even to resurrect the old one.
John Norton-Griffiths, ‘Empire Jack’, engineer and strapping essence of imperial British manliness, was sent to Romania in 1916 to destroy that country’s oil industry before the...
American democracy is an amazing, fascinating, bewildering thing. There has never been anything else like it. Even now, as democracy becomes an ever more familiar feature of our world, there is...
John Enoch Powell was an eminent classical scholar, as his entry in Who’s Who proclaimed: Craven Scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge, 1931; First Chancellor’s Classical Medallist;...
With 760 members, the House of Lords is the second largest legislature in the world behind the National People’s Congress of China. If you ignore lower chambers and compare it only to other...
Many of the battalions dotted across the Syrian countryside consist only of a man with a connection to a financier, along with a few of his cousins and clansmen.