Communism
The rotten legacy of communism in Albania
Our heavily laden taxi turned off the main highway from Tirana and started to negotiate the rough, one-track road. The…
Biden’s Brezhnev vibes
Like many other Americans who had the misfortune to live under socialism, I’ve been having lots of flashbacks lately. In…
Are liberal conservatives now history?
It was a luminous late August sunset, and we were in France, dining outdoors with some friends who have a…
Welcome to authoritarian Hong Kong
The national security law in Hong Kong has been passed for just over a month, but the scope of Beijing’s…
The forgotten victims of communism
I just read a piece by Scott McConnell in the American Conservative, a magazine we co-founded 18 years ago. He…
It was Bevin, not Bevan, who was the real national treasure
Alan Johnson pays tribute to Ernest Bevin, a towering political figure too often forgotten
Anglo-Chinese misunderstanding: an Oxford don visits 1960s Beijing
This book is a rather startling depiction of Hugh Trevor-Roper’s involvement with the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding (SACU), his sponsored…
I’d rather live under communism than the tyranny of social media
At the time it felt like a century, but it was only 12 years. I began this column in 1977…
How does today’s world compare with Orwell’s nightmare vision?
Apart from a passionate relationship with the common toad, what do George Orwell and David Attenborough have in common? H.G.…
How to fight Bolshevism
From 10 May 1919: The heart of the country is always for moderation. Nothing could show this more plainly than…
How Eric Hobsbawm remained a lifelong communist — despite the ‘unpleasant data’
Sir Richard Evans, retired regius professor of history at Cambridge, has always been a hefty historian. The densely compacted facts…
Ian Kershaw recounts Europe’s recovery from WWII – have the good times run their course?
When I reviewed the first volume of Sir Ian Kershaw’s wrist-breaking history of the last 100 years of Europe, To…
No apology is ever enough for the digital mob
Promoting physical fitness, the left has developed a bracing set of competitive callisthenics. Participants vie over who can complete a…
Teen Vogue and the rebirth of Radical Chic
Are we witnessing the rebirth of Radical Chic? That was the term coined by Tom Wolfe in his 1970 essay…
Marxism didn’t die. It’s alive and well and living among us
I remember the autumn day in 1990 when they came to cart away the large hammer and sickle outside my…
Enduring life under Chairman Mao
Rao Pingru is 94, and a born storyteller. His gripping graphic narrative weaves in and out of the violent, disruptive…
Doris Lessing: from champion of free love to frump with a bun
‘I am interested only in stretching myself, in living as fully as I can.’ Lara Feigel begins her thoughtful book…
The Cambridge spy ring and the myth of an upper-class cover up
It has become fashionable since the fall of the Soviet Union to diagnose communist fellow travelling as a form of…
The mischief of Bolshevism
From ‘The Bolshevik negotiations with Germany’, 19 January 1918: We think that the fact is fairly emerging from the negotiations…
Tales out of school
In 1952, the five-year-old Michael Rosen and his brother were taken on holiday along the Thames by their communist parents.…
Pole position
Did you know that they used to make the Fiat 126 in the Eastern bloc? They did, apparently. There was…
Armageddon averted
From 1945 to 1992 the Cold War was the climate. Individual weather events stood out — the Korean War, the…
Enver Hoxha: Stalin’s devilish disciple
In his final public appearance, the Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha addressed a Tirana crowd to commemorate the capital’s liberation from…
Meet the fans who risk death for heavy metal
We in the West may snigger at heavy metal, but in some parts of the world its practitioners face the death penalty. Karen Yossman reports
The very Czech (and very funny) brilliance of Bohumil Hrabal
‘A crane fell on top of me in Kladno in 1952, after which my writing got better,’ Bohumil Hrabal (who…
