The BBC has made Niall Ferguson this year's Reith Lecturer. To mark the occasion we repost Stephen Howe's 2004 review of his ‘Colossus’, setting the book
The death in April 2010 of Fred Halliday, engaged political intellectual and scholar of international relations, provoked many tributes from among the worldwide fellowship of colleagues he had done so much to create and nurture. Now, in what is both a preliminary assessment and an incisive overvie
Almost throughout the 1970s and '80s, Uganda was quite widely seen as the worst place in Africa, the heart of the heart of darkness. And at the centre of
In early, silent westerns it was easy to tell the good guys from the bad. Baddies wore black hats and didn't shave. The heroes had white hats, and
Rarely, if ever, has a film arrived humping so much extraneous baggage as Steven Spielberg's Munich. The movie's political and ethical message, its historical accuracy or
In the first part of this openDemocracy essay I examined the crisis of Northern Irelands working-class Protestant communities, as exemplified in the severe rioting of the second week of
The riots, paramilitary assaults, car-hijackings, road-blockings and widespread mayhem which swept Northern Ireland in the second week of September 2005 were the worst for many years. They involved, almost exclusively,
On 22 April 2005, the annual council meeting of Britains Association of University Teachers (AUT) voted - against the advice of the AUT executive - for an academic boycott
On both sides of the Atlantic, universities and academics are embroiled in bitter controversy over attitudes to the middle east, and especially to Israel. Theres nothing new in that:
Yasser Arafats death marks the end of an era. So everyone says: the notion became a weary cliché well before his demise was even, finally, announced on 11 November
Some deaths like Yasser Arafats gain an obvious, global significance from the sheer magnitude of the lives they end. Some attain importance from the way they are memorialised: how
We travel like other people, but we return to nowhere. As if travelling
Is the way of the clouds
We have a country of words. Speak speak so I can
