Book review – politics
Aung San Suu Kyi couldn’t save Burma — but tourism can
My uncle Edward did not like talking about his service in Burma during the second world war. When I asked…
Racism is a grey area
This book is an exercise in crying wolf that utterly fails to prove its main thesis: that Europe is abandoning…
Bad news from paradise
Suddenly, the Maldivians are in the news. Earlier this year, they locked up their first democratically elected president, and just…
Marvellous, murderous city
When Stefan Zweig first arrived in Rio de Janeiro in 1936, he was overwhelmed not only by the city’s magnificent…
Going to pot
Since drugs became popular, there have been countless books on what to do with them. The most interesting are those…
Dirty dealing
Jonathan Powell is best known as Tony Blair’s fixer. He was intimately involved with the Northern Ireland peace process, about…
All the usual suspects
Owen Jones’s first book, Chavs, was a political bestseller. This follow-up skips over the middle classes and goes to the…
The boa constrictor observes its prey
Few subjects generate as much angst, or puzzlement, among Western policymakers in Africa as China’s presence on the continent. In…
A fictional country split in two
Sudan — a country that ceased to exist in 2011 — is or was one of the last untouristed wildernesses…
An awful warning
During Japan’s lost decade in the 1990s I found myself handing out rice balls to Tokyo’s homeless on the banks…
