Communism
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…
This other Eden
Whatever one thinks of the government’s plans to send refugees to Rwanda, it was amusing to see this country’s left…
Wild life
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…
Nyet to Dr No
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 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…
‘His paintings are perfectly meant for our times’
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
The secret history
Andrei Konchalovsky’s Dear Comrades! is based on a true event and set in 1962 in the Russian city of Novocherkassk…
Letter from 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…
High life
I just read a piece by Scott McConnell in the American Conservative, a magazine we co-founded 18 years ago. He…
Driving force
Alan Johnson pays tribute to Ernest Bevin, a towering political figure too often forgotten
Not a party person
This book is a rather startling depiction of Hugh Trevor-Roper’s involvement with the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding (SACU), his sponsored…
I’d rather live under communism than the tyranny of social media
At the time it felt like a century, but it was only 12 years. I began this column in 1977…
How does today’s world compare with Orwell’s nightmare vision?
Apart from a passionate relationship with the common toad, what do George Orwell and David Attenborough have in common? H.G.…
How to fight Bolshevism
From 10 May 1919: The heart of the country is always for moderation. Nothing could show this more plainly than…
How Eric Hobsbawm remained a lifelong communist — despite the ‘unpleasant data’
Sir Richard Evans, retired regius professor of history at Cambridge, has always been a hefty historian. The densely compacted facts…
Ian Kershaw recounts Europe’s recovery from WWII – have the good times run their course?
When I reviewed the first volume of Sir Ian Kershaw’s wrist-breaking history of the last 100 years of Europe, To…
No apology is ever enough for the digital mob
Promoting physical fitness, the left has developed a bracing set of competitive callisthenics. Participants vie over who can complete a…
