Corruption

At least Britain isn’t that corrupt

30 September 2023 9:00 am

Long-time readers may recall that I take a special interest in the art of corruption. And this week America has…

Will the bad luck of the Philippines ever turn?

7 May 2022 9:00 am

The Philippines is the odd man out in Asia, a predominantly Catholic country colonised first by Spain, then the United…

Zimbabwe’s politics satirised: Glory, by NoViolet Bulawayo, reviewed

2 April 2022 9:00 am

NoViolet Bulawayo’s first novel We Need New Names,shortlisted for the Booker in 2013, was a charming, tender gem, suffused with…

Britain’s money laundering scandal goes back a long way

26 March 2022 9:00 am

The war in Ukraine has turned a lot of people’s attention to oligarchs in the UK. How did these guys…

An innocent abroad: a Dutch tour operator in 1980s Russia

12 February 2022 9:00 am

‘One morning in late October 1988,’ begins TheLong Song of Tchaikovsky Street, ‘this dapper-looking guy from Leiden asked me if…

A broken nation: Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth, by Wole Soyinka, reviewed

4 December 2021 9:00 am

One of the best episodes in Wole Soyinka’s third novel (his first since 1973) takes place not in Nigeria but…

Corruption affects everything in Palestine – even vaccines

9 March 2021 9:58 pm

Visit certain parts of the West Bank and you’ll encounter mansions owned by senior officials in the Palestinian Authority (PA).…

Nicolas Sarkozy and a very French corruption scandal

2 March 2021 4:10 am

Nicolas Sarkozy, 66, President of France from 2007 to 2012, currently a valued member of Emmanuel Macron’s informal council of…

A cautionary tale about how democracy can subvert itself: Bunga Bunga reviewed

24 October 2020 9:00 am

Italy has long captivated romantics from rainy, dreary, orderly northern Europe. Goethe, Stendhal, Keats and Shelley all flocked to Italy…

Italy’s Achilles heel: corruption and cronyism

1 August 2020 9:00 am

Tim Parks is a seasoned, incisive observer of football, the railways, work, domestication and plenty more in his adoptive country…

baltimore

Is change on the horizon in Baltimore?

13 June 2020 6:09 am

Crime-ridden Baltimore finally dodged a bullet this week. The bullet, in this case, was former mayor Sheila Dixon, who nearly…

Moscow rules in London: how Putin’s agents corrupted the British elite

25 April 2020 9:00 am

Putin’s corrupt cronies may change, but the paranoid world view they all share remains the same, says Owen Matthews

In this golden age of corruption, it takes much courage to be a whistleblower

24 January 2020 10:00 pm

Midway through Crisis of Conscience, the massive new compendium about US whistleblowers by the journalist Tom Mueller, I wanted to…

Jonathan Dimbleby is right: we need to rise up and defend the BBC

6 July 2019 9:00 am

There’s been a Dimbleby on air since before I was born but last Friday saw the end of that era…

: In 2007, thousands of India’s poorest marched on Delhi to petition for land rights.

The scandalous swamp of Indian politics

8 December 2018 9:00 am

Picture India in 1991. You need to make several trips to Delhi and wait three years to import a computer.…

The long arm of the Russian super mafia

5 May 2018 9:00 am

Mark Galeotti’s study of Russian organised crime, the product of three decades of academic research and consultancy work, is more…

Law & Order, made – and banned – in 1978, puts most recent crime series in the shade

5 May 2018 9:00 am

It’s not every day that a television screenwriter is threatened with a trial for sedition, but G.F. Newman was after…

Corruption, corruption, corruption: the full story of Miami vice

27 January 2018 9:00 am

Sullying the glorious sunshine, sand and sea, Miami in the 1940s, when I first ventured there, was already overcrowded, vulgar…

Gleaming pictures of the past

14 October 2017 9:00 am

If you think you know what to expect from an Alan Hollinghurst novel, then when it comes to The Sparsholt…

Richard Nixon in September 1968

His dark materials

14 October 2017 9:00 am

In this giant, prodigiously sourced and insightful biography, John A. Farrell shows how Richard Milhous Nixon was the nightmare of…

Putting the boot into Italy

14 October 2017 9:00 am

A young woman, naked and covered in blood, totters numbly down a night road. A driver spots her in his…

Punks vs. Putin

9 September 2017 9:00 am

What makes for meaningful political protest? In regimes where ideology was taken seriously (such as the Soviet Union or America…

Disgusted of London - A.L. Kennedy's Serious Sweet reviewed

14 May 2016 9:00 am

Twenty-four long hours, two lonely people, one city in decline. This is the premise of A.L. Kennedy’s new novel Serious…

Kathmandu is famously reputed to have more temples than houses, more idols than residents

Kathmandu — or don’t

7 May 2016 9:00 am

Although Nepal’s earthquake last April visited our television screens with images of seismic devastation, the disaster has probably had little…

A senile Putin becomes a parody of his own parody

19 March 2016 9:00 am

The decrepitude of old age is a piteous sight and subject. In his second book Michael Honig — a doctor-turned-novelist…