Communism
An insider’s account of the CCP’s stranglehold on China
A high-ranking intelligence officer leaves a cache of letters revealing his increasing disenchantment with the party after being purged numerous times
The travails of Britain’s first Labour government
Attacked in the press, by the right and even by its own supporters, Ramsay MacDonald’s short-lived government still managed to achieve a surprising amount
The freedom fighters who dared to take on a communist superpower
Shibani Mahtani and Timothy McLaughlin describe the courage of the youthful protest leaders in Hong Kong who sacrificed so much for the cause of democracy
Poland, 1968: the last pogrom
‘Are you Jewish?’ the officious-looking Dutch diplomat asked my dad. ‘Yes’, he said, realising at that very moment, everything had…
We love you, Uncle Xi!
Tom Miller on the cult of personality that China’s ‘core leader’ has so ruthlessly constructed
The humanity of Mikhail Gorbachev
Mikhail Gorbachev, the final President of the Soviet Union who died last night, was remarkable both as an international politician…
Gorbachev was no saint. But he was a kind of hero
Mikhail Gorbachev is dead at the age of 91, and in a way I feel orphaned. I became fascinated by…
Is self-loathing the British disease?
Whatever one thinks of the government’s plans to send refugees to Rwanda, it was amusing to see this country’s left…
The sin of neutrality
Yet again, millions of civilians across the Horn of Africa are starving. The world blames the crisis on drought and…
Why Russians celebrate monsters
Nobody knows how long people live in Dzerzhinsk – life expectancy statistics for the Russian city, 250 miles east of…
Putin’s neo-communism is doomed to fail
It is responsible for inequality. For financial instability. And probably for poverty, racism and global warming as well. We have…
What the Russians thought of James Bond in the 1960s
Last year I wrote a piece about James Bond for the ‘Freelance’ column of the Times Literary Supplement. All true…
Was the US involved in neo-fascist Italian terrorism?
Last month, Italy’s Prime Minister Mario Draghi promised to declassify government documents involving two organisations: Gladio, an anti-communist paramilitary group…
Tales from the Gulag: why I’m helping survivors tell their stories
Why I’m helping survivors tell their stories
Why the far-right flourishes in East Germany
A spectre is haunting Germany — the spectre of the AfD. Having come to prominence on a wave of anti-migrant…
The truth about my father, Philip Guston
Musa Mayer talks to Hermione Eyre about her father Philip Guston’s cancellation and her fear that he will for ever be known as the artist who painted the Ku Klux Klan
Riveting: Dear Comrades! reviewed
Andrei Konchalovsky’s Dear Comrades! is based on a true event and set in 1962 in the Russian city of Novocherkassk…
The rotten legacy of communism in Albania
Our heavily laden taxi turned off the main highway from Tirana and started to negotiate the rough, one-track road. The…
Biden’s Brezhnev vibes
Like many other Americans who had the misfortune to live under socialism, I’ve been having lots of flashbacks lately. In…
Are liberal conservatives now history?
It was a luminous late August sunset, and we were in France, dining outdoors with some friends who have a…
Welcome to authoritarian Hong Kong
The national security law in Hong Kong has been passed for just over a month, but the scope of Beijing’s…
The forgotten victims of communism
I just read a piece by Scott McConnell in the American Conservative, a magazine we co-founded 18 years ago. He…
It was Bevin, not Bevan, who was the real national treasure
Alan Johnson pays tribute to Ernest Bevin, a towering political figure too often forgotten
Anglo-Chinese misunderstanding: an Oxford don visits 1960s Beijing
This book is a rather startling depiction of Hugh Trevor-Roper’s involvement with the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding (SACU), his sponsored…