Corruption
Small-town mysteries: A Case of Matricide, by Graeme MacRae Burnet, reviewed
The gifted writer Graeme Macrae Burnet makes a mockery of the genres publishers impose on credulous readers. The author of…
The enduring charisma of Brazil’s working-class president
With his dedication to the labouring poor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is seen as both the humblest of politicians and his country’s saviour – perhaps even endowed with miraculous qualities
Imprisoned for years on Putin’s whim
Vladimir Pereverzin’s ‘crime’ was to have worked for a company owned by Mikhail Khodorkovsky – and refusing to give false evidence resulted in an 11-year sentence in the camps
At least Britain isn’t that corrupt
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?
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
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
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
‘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
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
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
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
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
Tim Parks is a seasoned, incisive observer of football, the railways, work, domestication and plenty more in his adoptive country…
Is change on the horizon in Baltimore?
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
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
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
There’s been a Dimbleby on air since before I was born but last Friday saw the end of that era…
The scandalous swamp of Indian politics
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
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
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
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
If you think you know what to expect from an Alan Hollinghurst novel, then when it comes to The Sparsholt…
His dark materials
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
A young woman, naked and covered in blood, totters numbly down a night road. A driver spots her in his…
Punks vs. Putin
What makes for meaningful political protest? In regimes where ideology was taken seriously (such as the Soviet Union or America…
