The day before the latest elections in Athens, the German tabloid Bild published an open letter. ‘Dear Greeks,’ it read, ‘Please don’t do anything stupid … The only...
As a boy in Texas, growing up in poor and sometimes desperate circumstances, LBJ told anyone who would listen that he was headed for the White House.
In the 1980s Hungary was known as the ‘merriest barracks in the socialist camp’. After the suppression of the 1956 uprising by the Red Army, János Kádár instituted...
Michael Sandel’s What Money Can’t Buy does for the market what the London Dungeon does for urban history.
The event that turned a story about a few hacked phones into a scandal that came close to bringing down one branch of the world’s most powerful media empire was a piece of mistaken...
The story of the People’s Mujahedin of Iran is all about the way image management can enable a diehard enemy to become a cherished ally.
‘Over Sixty Hours without an Execution.’ When PM, the biggest tabloid in Ciudad Juárez, can’t find a corpse to put on its front page, it has to come up with something. On...
If you forget the name, you’ll remember the braids; the blonde corona framing her head that declares: ‘Ukraine, c’est moi.’ After Angela Merkel, Yulia Tymoshenko is...
You can tell Russia is not a real democracy because there is no great mystery about its politics. Democracies are slightly baffling in how they work: just look at America; just look at Europe; just...
The ninth of the Crowns of the Martyrs by Prudentius, the great Christian poet of the fifth century, tells of his visit to the tomb in Rome of Cassian of Imola. Above the tomb hung a grisly...
Black-shirted vigilantes from the neo-fascist Golden Dawn movement have been patrolling the streets and beating up all the immigrants they can find.
The magical transformation of Bashar-the-Lion to Bashar-the-Scaredy-Cat to Bashar-the-Duck.
Climate ethics is not morality applied but morality discovered, a new chapter in the moral education of mankind. It may tell us things we do not wish to know (about democracy, perhaps), but the future...
French voters in London were out in force on 22 April. At the new French school in Kentish Town – primary through lycée, fee-paying – there were four lines of blue and white...
The socioeconomic arrangement that emerged from the turmoil of the 1970s is faltering.
Rebecca Simmonds spread her debt duvet out over the sofa in the rented one-room flat in East London she shares with her partner, Aaron. The first panel in the quilt is a letter from the Alliance...
When I met him, Otsuchi city administrator Kozo Hirani, a substantial, balding man in a brown pinstripe suit, was on the upper floor of a warren of small-scale temporary buildings that now...
Is the dismissal of Bo Xilai the most important political event in China since 1989?