Barbara Walter’s book has a promising beginning. An academic who has been studying civil wars for some time now, she tries to come up with an explanation for why civil wars happen. A lot of…
Sixty years ago, the United States was still in the grip of the McCarthy era. The Attorney General would regularly update his list of “subversive” organisations. Communists and other leftists were denied platforms in many…
According to its website, the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia (FNPR) is “a national trade union centre independent of the state, political and business structures.” Founded in 1990, it is the successor to…
Avi Loeb is the head of the Astronomy Department at Harvard University and is one of the world leaders in his field. He believes that ‘Oumuamua, an object detected in 2017 as it flew through…
There is a saying that generals are always ready to fight the last war. The same may be said of political leaders. The difference is that they are ready to stop the last war, and…
Dick Tregaskis was a legendary American war correspondent who covered the Second World War, Korea and Vietnam. When he was just 26 years old, he accompanied Marines who landed on the island of Guadalcanal with…
Ben Macintyre is a brilliant storyteller – and this is a brilliant story. The story is a relatively simple one: With an Allied invasion of Sicily imminent in 1943, the British decided to deceive the…
When the Soviet Union came crashing down three decades ago, among the very first republics to declare independence were the three Baltic states – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. This made sense as they had been…
A few days ago the Guardian ran an article by Bernie Sanders entitled “We must do everything possible to avoid an enormously destructive war in Ukraine.” He’s certainly right about that – no reasonable person…
Science journalist David Robson makes something very clear early on in this book: this is NOT going to be one of those books (like Rhonda Byrne’s best-selling The Secret) that insists you can wish yourself…