Book review – politics
Aung San Suu Kyi couldn’t save Burma — but tourism can
My uncle Edward did not like talking about his service in Burma during the second world war. When I asked…
Racism is a grey area
This book is an exercise in crying wolf that utterly fails to prove its main thesis: that Europe is abandoning…
The Maldives: sun, sand and fanaticism
Suddenly, the Maldivians are in the news. Earlier this year, they locked up their first democratically elected president, and just…
Life in Rio’s most infamous favela — where you have to pay the cops to arrest criminals
When Stefan Zweig first arrived in Rio de Janeiro in 1936, he was overwhelmed not only by the city’s magnificent…
An ill-waged war against the war on drugs
Since drugs became popular, there have been countless books on what to do with them. The most interesting are those…
Why Jonathan Powell thinks we'll have to negotiate with al-Qa’eda
Jonathan Powell is best known as Tony Blair’s fixer. He was intimately involved with the Northern Ireland peace process, about…
Owen Jones’s new book should be called The Consensus: And How I Want to Change it
Owen Jones’s first book, Chavs, was a political bestseller. This follow-up skips over the middle classes and goes to the…
What are the Chinese up to in Africa?
Few subjects generate as much angst, or puzzlement, among Western policymakers in Africa as China’s presence on the continent. In…
Sudan was always an invented country. Maybe we should invent it again
Sudan — a country that ceased to exist in 2011 — is or was one of the last untouristed wildernesses…
Is there a way to live without economic growth?
During Japan’s lost decade in the 1990s I found myself handing out rice balls to Tokyo’s homeless on the banks…
