No Place Like Rome
Surviving by Allan Massie
Politics, Ideas and the Arts
From Job to the Enlightenment
Susan Neiman’s reading of the Enlightenment is certainly distinctive, but also offers a courageous and uplifting attempt to tell the story as it is Our idea of modernity is in many ways
Chopin as prophet
The Pianist, based on Wladyslaw Szpilman's memoirs and reimagined in words and music by the Russian pianist Mikhail Rudy, has been enjoying a two-week run at the Royal Exchange Theatre as part
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
The usual hotchpotch at the RA Summer Exhibition and some awful Americana from Charles Saatchi
To One War, 55 Marks
This year’s war on expenses is nothing compared to the one started in 1939 – World War II In this world nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes,”
United States: The Path to Rome via San Francisco
‘In the 1950s, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene wrote triumphalist Catholic novels with miracles as part of the story — Brideshead Revisited, The End of the Affair. They were bestsellers. Since Vatican II,
Paris: Prisoner of the Barbarians
‘In February 2007, a naked, emaciated, mutilated, charred and stabbed man is discovered near railway tracks in the Parisian suburb of Sainte Geneviève-des-Bois. He is taken to hospital where he is pronounced dead
Demons in the Details
Hollywood and physics should be kept apart — pretty much like matter and anti-matter
Banking on Allah
Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens: Islamists claim that a sharia-compliant financial system is safer and morally superior. The truth is more sinister
Adventures of a Book in Africa
Michela Wrong's exposé of corruption in Kenya was suppressed, then pirated, and finally rescued by an unlikely combination of saviours.
Exile on Jermyn Street
Blacklisted by Hollywood, my father Carl Foreman made a new life in Britain. But he never forsook the country of his birth, says Jonathan Foreman Funerals feel more natural in the winter.
Does Engagement with Terrorists Save Lives?
I have recently written about the British government's misguided strategy of seeking to engage with Hamas and Hezbollah, in the hope that this will coax them into moderation. This debate was re