revolution

A complicated bond: The Best of Friends, by Kamila Shamsie, reviewed

24 September 2022 9:00 am

When I think of Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire, I picture a pot boiling on a hob, the water level rising…

An empire crumbles: Nights of Plague, by Orhan Pamuk, reviewed

24 September 2022 9:00 am

Welcome to Mingheria, ‘pearl of the Levant’. On a spring day, as the 20th century dawns, you disembark at this…

A botched coup: the desperate Cato Street conspiracy

14 May 2022 9:00 am

Almost half of the terrorists hadn’t even turned up. Still, on the night of 23 February 1820, 25 men, including…

Tehran is repeating the Shah's mistakes

22 July 2021 8:11 am

The Iranian province of Khuzestan is oil-rich but water-poor. At the best of times, the southwestern region is a problem…

There’s nothing a white person can do about racism, says Dr Kehinde Andrews

23 January 2021 9:00 am

After the death of George Floyd last year, and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests around the world, racism is…

Toussaint Louverture: the true hero of Haiti

29 August 2020 9:00 am

Toussaint Louverture’s ‘crazy dream’ for Haiti has still to be realised, says Amy Wilentz

revolution

The neoliberal counter-revolution

2 July 2020 1:34 pm

America is not in the middle of a revolution — it is a reactionary putsch. About four years ago, the…

revolution

You say you want a revolution?

24 June 2020 11:29 pm

In the early hours of May 30, after a night of violent protests in New York, two lawyers were arrested by the…

Nostalgia for old Ceylon: lush foliage and tender feelings from Romesh Gunesekera

30 November 2019 9:00 am

Empires are born to die; that’s one source of their strange allure. An untenable form of society judders, in technicolor…

‘The conclusion of the 18 October demonstration’

Small but deadly: postcards that fuelled the Russian Revolution

12 January 2019 9:00 am

In this handsomely illustrated book Tobie Mathew makes a case for the lowly postcard’s role in the politicisation of pre-revolutionary…

Before fleeing to London, Emmanuel Barthélemy commanded a barricade during the June Days uprising in Paris in 1848. Painting by Tony-François de Bergue

The cruel end of Emmanuel Barthélemy –as a waxwork in the Chamber of Horrors

26 May 2018 9:00 am

This is a biography that begins with a bang, swiftly followed by puddles of blood, shrieks of ‘Murder!’ and a…

A child freedom fighter in Budapest, 1956

1956: the year of living dangerously

13 February 2016 9:00 am

The book of the year has long been a favoured genre in popular history, and is a commonplace today. While…

Egypt on its knees: Friday prayers in Tahrir Square

For Egypt, a bitter winter has followed the Arab spring

30 January 2016 9:00 am

Jack Shenker is a throwback to an older, more romantic age when foreign correspondents were angry, partisan and half-crazed with…

Students at the Wartburg festival in October 1817, celebrating the tercentenary of the Reformation and the fourth anniversary of the Battle of Leipzig, cause panic in the courts of Europe

How a clumsy drummer started the 1848 revolutions

18 October 2014 9:00 am

There are hundreds of resounding ideas and shrewd precepts in Adam Zamoyski’s temperate yet splendidly provocative Phantom Terror. This is…

The Russian literary celebrity who begged Tolstoy to spare Prince Andrei

19 July 2014 9:00 am

Nadezhda Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya was a literary celebrity in pre-revolutionary St Petersburg. She chose the pen-name ‘Teffi’ because it was androgynous,…

Aimé Tschiffely with Mancha and Gato. The strongest emotional bonds he formed on his epic journey were with his horses

A horse ride from Buenos Aires to New York? No problem!

14 June 2014 8:00 am

Sam Leith marvels at a lone horseman’s 10,000-mile ride, braving bandits, quicksands, vampire bats and revolution in search of ‘variety’

From Nasser to Mubarak — Egypt's modern pharaohs and their phoney myths

25 January 2014 9:00 am

Jonathan Rugman is foreign affairs correspondent for Channel 4 News.

Syria’s war in miniature: meeting the Christians driven out of Qusayr

10 August 2013 9:00 am

Events in one Syrian town cast light on the nation’s strife