LONDON: This is my last column for a while. I am off to become Chairman of the BBC Trust — the strategic authority of one of the greatest broadcasting organizations in the world. So I have to take a Sicilian vow of omerta on controversial issues for (...)
LONDON: Anyone who has read The Yacoubian Building, a novel published in 2002 by the Egyptian author Alaa Al-Aswany, will regard the revolution in Egypt as long overdue. The novel's readers will not have been astonished by the ease with which the (...)
LONDON: President Hu Jintao will travel to the United States for his third official visit as China's leader on Jan. 19. It may be his last before he hands over power to his apparently designated successor, Vice President Xi Jinping, in 2012 — (...)
LONDON: It's been a better year for God. After withering literary assaults on the Almighty from the Oxford academic Richard Dawkins, the essayist Christopher Hitchens, and others, believers have hit back.
Best of all has been The Case for God by (...)
LONDON: We are told that we live in anxious times, with lots to worry about and no more comforting certainty. But just how comfortable were all those past certainties, anyway?
I grew up in a world in which peace and stability were assured by the (...)
SYDNEY: The rescue of the 33 Chilean miners, from what was feared would be their tomb, gave the world something to cheer about. Hope has not, after all, become a redundant virtue in the twenty-first century. But, looking around us today, there do (...)
LONDON: To the surprise of many in the media — at home and abroad — Pope Benedict XVI's just completed visit to Britain was an outstanding success. As a Roman Catholic and as the person asked by Prime Minister David Cameron to supervise government (...)
TOULOUSE: Europe's holiday month of August is no time for serious politics. The world and its worries are meant to close down while Europeans repose.
I usually spend the month with my family at our old converted farmhouse in southwestern France. (...)
GAZA CITY: It is easier to enter a maximum-security prison than it is to enter the strip of land — 45 kilometers long and maybe eight wide — that is home to Gaza's 1.5 million Palestinians. Surrounded by a forbidding wall, watchtowers, and deadly (...)
LONDON: American exceptionalism, when it runs rampant, is a tsunami to be avoided. The oil company BP is discovering that right now.
The environmental disaster destroying seaside communities around the Gulf of Mexico and killing off marine life (...)
LONDON: Volcanoes have consequences — and I'm not just thinking about the chaos caused to air travel by Iceland's unpronounceable last eruption (known to the Pentagon as E-15).
In 1783, a volcano in Iceland spewed so much ash into the atmosphere (...)
LONDON: I don't mean to sound as though I am bragging, but the last time the Conservative Party won an election in Britain was 1992, when John Major was Prime Minister. The chairman of the party at the time, running the winning campaign, was (...)
MUMBAI: Every day, a small Japanese jet brings another 60 businessmen from Tokyo to sniff out new commercial opportunities in Mumbai and the heart of the Indian economy. Naturally, there may be a touch of geopolitical calculation about this. As (...)
LONDON: Remember the G-2? America's financial difficulties and foreign entanglements, together with China's economic ascent, led many last year to envisage the emergence of a sort of global condominium between the two countries. The G-8 had morphed (...)
LONDON: Reading Barack Obama's "Dreams from My Father, the US president's beautifully written reflections on his early life and identity, most people are struck by his cool and intellectual approach. This is not to say that he is unemotional. Obama (...)
LONDON: The British comic genius Spike Milligan once observed that he would love to have the opportunity to discover that money wouldn't make him happy.
Big lottery winners, it is claimed, end up miserable, though real-life research suggests that (...)
LONDON: The selection of Herman van Rompuy as President of the European Union's Council of Ministers, and of Lady Catherine Ashton as the EU's foreign policy chief, surely underlines the extent to which member states are in the driver's seat in the (...)
LONDON: Having reached pensionable age, I qualify to be a grumpy old man. I should be boring my children, and the students at Oxford University where I am Chancellor, with grumbles about how everything is going to the dogs. But that is not quite how (...)
LONDON: Groucho Marx has always been my favorite Marxist. One of his jokes goes to the heart of the failure of the ideology - the dogmatic religion - inflicted on our poor world by his namesake, Karl.
"Who are you going to believe, Groucho once (...)
LONDON: In her brilliant book, "The Uses and Abuses of History the historian Margaret Macmillan tells a story about two Americans discussing the atrocities of September 11, 2001. One draws an analogy with Pearl Harbor, Japan's attack on the US in (...)
LONDON: In the last two months, I have been in eight American cities - Boston, New York, Washington, Houston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. Phew! I am left with several sentiments.
First, if you have to travel from city to (...)
LONDON: Individual elections do not always enhance democracy - a useful reminder that the ballot box is only one part, albeit a central one, in any free, plural society. Of course, there are also magnificent examples of elections that strengthen (...)
LONDON: George W. Bush has started work on his memoirs. Count to ten before you respond.
The autobiographies of political leaders are not a very elevated literary form. First, few leaders write well, though there are exceptions, like Nehru, (...)
LONDON: I was in Jordan, that beautiful oasis of calm and moderation in a difficult and dangerous neighborhood, when I first heard the news about the murder of two British soldiers and a Catholic policeman by dissident republican terrorists in (...)
LONDON: Bipartisanship seems to have taken a drubbing in Washington since President Barack Obama got to the White House.
Like most recent American presidents, Obama campaigned on a promise to work with his political opponents for the greater good (...)