There are two sorts of defeats the left can suffer. There are devastating defeats that set it back years or even decades. And there are small defeats from which it can learn. The defeat for Hugo Chavez’s referendum on a… Continue Reading
The title of an article we ran on Pakistan 18 months ago was “On the Edge of Instability”. Now the country is well inside the arc of instability created by the “war on terror”, adding to the multitude of problems… Continue Reading
The Brown bounce has become the Brown belly flop—and one into an ever stormier ocean. The immediate source of New Labour’s misery is obvious. Those who live by the image die by the image. Nothing distinguishes Labour’s post-Thatcherite programme for… Continue Reading
Are Islamist movements ‘radical’ or ‘ultra-conservative’? A so-called “Islamic” party has just been elected with nearly 50% of the vote in Turkey. It is in no way “ultra-conservative”. It is, of course, conservative on such issues as the economy, the… Continue Reading
Mark Twain once quipped, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” Replace the word “lie” with the phrase “ideologically motivated myth” and it sums up what has happened to the commonsense… Continue Reading
Archie Brown, Seven Years that Changed the World: Perestroika in Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2007), £25 Archie Brown is credited with being the first person to advise Margaret Thatcher about the likely accession of Mikhail Gorbachev as a radical reformer… Continue Reading
Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (Verso, 2005), £14.99 As its title insists, Archaeologies of the Future represents a self-conscious, and triumphantly self-confident, attempt to find traces of an alternative future that… Continue Reading
Jim House and Neil McMaster, Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror and Memory (Oxford University, 2006), £60 Leaving aside situations of insurrection, revolution or civil war, the massacre of Algerian demonstrators that took place from 17 to 20 October 1961 in… Continue Reading
Ramzy Baroud, The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People’s Struggle (Pluto, 2006), £15.99 The unique strength of Ramzy Baroud’s book lies in its masterful weaving of personal experience and feelings into a meticulous and powerful account of the… Continue Reading
Jamil Hilal (ed), Where now for Palestine? The Demise of the Two-State Solution (Zed Books, 2007), £17.99 This collection of essays by a variety of academics is a significant development in the debate over the possibility of a “one_state” (or… Continue Reading