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Russian history rhymes — from Soviet collapse to Putin’s folly

A ship without a captain — Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union by Vladislav Zubok review

How Iran’s grand strategy collapsed

Russia in 2020: alternative scenarios of the near future

The making of modern Ukraine

The triumph of the Motherland

The Eurasian Century, Part IV: Cold War

Myths and realities of Putinism and NATO expansion

Outside in, inside out: Russia as an empire on the periphery

Russia: a short history of failed coups

A real Russian heart: Aleksandr Dugin, Vladimir Putin and the dangerous new Russian ideology

Gorbachev did not end the Cold War alone — the West won

When banks fail

America’s Afghan reckoning

Russia and the West – the path not taken

The swift death of Gorbachev’s USSR set Russia on a path to chaos

The price of freedom

A Cold War with Chinese characteristics

Jimmy Carter, orphan of the American Century

Why liberal democracies win total wars

How Russia and Iran have united in antipathy towards the West

Decline in three dimensions

Soviet socialism was no good at groceries

The Caliphate: the persistence of a brutal ideology

Great Books: William Golding’s The Spire

Finance without trust: a perilous business

Bad history — why the Treaty of Versailles is an imperfect guide to future Russia-West relations

Challenging the ‘Great Reset’ theory of pandemics

What does the future of evolution look like?

The decay and renewal of the American constitutional order

Everything is not really okay in Afghanistan

The timely return of Henry Clay

The unmaking of Julius Caesar

EI Weekly Listen — Rolf Ekéus on how to end wars

Why dictators fall

The last days of the Fifth Republic

World order — improvised by design

Nazism’s downfall and the aftermath of war

Eisenhower’s vision of European security

Nehemiah Wallington – Puritan chronicler had far less fun than Pepys

A little history of the modern Middle East

Empire and development in First Millennium Europe

Alexander Helphand — impresario of revolutionary disaster who smoothed Lenin’s return to Russia

The new Warsaw Pact

Beware the Ides of August

The true sources of Soviet conduct

The gerontology of power

The tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV

Meritocracy v the people

What Putin learnt from NATO’s 1999 intervention in Kosovo

The shifting fortunes of IS-Khorasan

Jacques Rueff’s quest for monetary order

Modern France and the ghosts of the past

Unipolar America: another imperial delusion ends

To avoid a dictatorship of scholars

The old republic of Europe

Geopolitics and the Mongol Empire

Towards a Westphalia for the Middle East

History while it’s still smoking

Putin bets the Russia house on the Donbas rustbelt

When did sexual decadence lose its association with social decline?

Future proof

Learning from the big, bold 1990s debates over the post-Cold War world

Will Russia be happy as China’s junior partner?

As the Arctic thaws, are we able to keep its peace?

Kazakhstan’s Russia problem

The Kremlin has its eyes on Gagauzia

Capitalism’s magic ingredient is confidence

Russia’s unbearable frontline burden

An endless dialogue between past and present

What the Romans did for the US

Russia, America and the roads not taken

Daniel Patrick Moynihan: Warrior of the liberal centre

Russia: Nation of floods

Martin Niemöller’s stand against Hitler

NATO’s next act

Russia’s century of scientific autarky

Russia returns to Svalbard

The death of Tsarist Russia and the creation of modern Ukraine

The deep historical roots of Russia’s militarisation of the Arctic

The wages of Putin’s war

1975, the year that made the modern world

Russia’s shadow war for Eastern Europe

Syria’s rebels won the war – can they win the peace?

Books of the Year 2024

Why Assad’s fall took the world by surprise

The West’s year of living anxiously

How Iran’s Tanker War shaped Trump’s worldview

Xi Jinping’s moment of truth

The Knights Templars and the pursuit of Christendom

The invention of suburbia

Why utopias still matter

A warning to the young: just say no to AI

Solzhenitsyn, Putin and the historical myth-making that drives Russian imperialism

Ukraine on the move: a century of migration

The march of the sovereign individuals

Cubans are losing their fear

Fritz Mannheimer – stockbroker of peace

Napoleonic Europe: how the Emperor built a continent

Confucius, competition and modern China’s misuse of meritocracy

Inside the Collective Unconscious

Putin’s Game: How did so many in the West get Russia so wrong?

Counting the cost of the 1918-19 pandemic

The world that saltpetre built

Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto-gold turned to dust

How the GDR fell in love with the West

A most rebellious territory

Vienna’s vapour trail

Russia’s long war with the maritime powers

Music in Auschwitz

A Russian nation struggles to be born

From broken windows to bulldozers

God is back

The end of history ends

The ancient roots of the modern holy war

Yugoslavia and the ghosts of nationalism

Machiavelli and the benefits of civil strife

The war against printing

Knowing Russia was going to invade Ukraine was not enough

Khorloogiin Choibalsan — Stalin of the steppe

Akinpelu Obisesan — a gentleman diarist in colonial Africa

The world that Vasco da Gama built

Basil Liddell Hart and the Art of Peace

Can warfare ever be considered modern?

The Nation in Arms: Myth or reality?

Why the idea of Carthage survived Roman conquest

The transformation of Mitteleuropa

How war created the nation state and yet could destroy it

This crisis has the capacity to be apocalyptic

The polymath in the age of specialisation

Thucydides was a Realist

Christianity in a cold climate – Jesuit encounters with Japan

Rethinking the Meiji Restoration

Was Horace a town or a country mouse?

Nafissa Sid Cara — an ambiguous pioneer for Muslim women

Duality, determinism and demography: The Greeks on geopolitics

Chiang Ching-kuo — dictator or democrat?

Time running out in China’s waiting game — The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order by Rush Doshi review

Margaret Thatcher – the fall, thirty years on

Shaping society — The Making of Our Urban Landscape by Geoffrey Tyack review

Meet the Zoomer generation

Waugh’s war

Inside the disinformation forever war

How Arcadia was won and lost and found again

Globalisation — lessons from George Canning on how to remake trade

Ukraine and Russia: how closeness turned into war

Reassessing Christian history

A world of nations and states is here to stay

Why Jihadists write poetry

Jaan Kross — a writer’s route to happiness

The tragic tradition of Ukraine’s Sviatohirsk Lavra

The Soviet military was a hollow colossus

How US policy failure post-9/11 undermined international order

Where has ‘the good life’ gone?

Dunwich’s very English apocalypse

The problem of power in Russia

Why do politicians get energy policy wrong?

Survival lessons from Ancient Rome

Continuity Thatcher: rescuing a complex leader from historical cliché

The Eurasian Century, Part II: The Great Black Tornado

Nijinsky’s last dance

Is energy the god of progress?

Geopolitics of a pandemic

The forgotten lessons of First World War strategy

When disaster strikes

Crisis, settlement, or containment — what is to be done on Russia?

Despotism or anarchy? — Promised Lands: The British and the Ottoman Middle East by Jonathan Parry review

Rethinking geopolitics

Imperial Germany – mighty aristocracy or modern meritocracy?

What is the purpose of existence?

The Queen, Stoicism and the defence of the Faith

The geopolitics and grand strategy of Alfred Thayer Mahan

Rousseau and the barbarity of education

The 1920 Battle for Ukraine — a warning from the past

Gustav Stresemann — The man who almost saved the world

Frederic Prokosch — freedom in fiction

James Flint – a sino-pioneer ahead of his time

Fighting in the shadows

From miracles to massacres – Japan’s tumultuous 20th century

2020: Putting our pandemic in perspective

Mikhail Gorbachev gave Russia a chance

The Pacific Century is here — but not as advertised

Bond or Blofeld: war, espionage and secrecy in the twenty-first century

The economy and the paradox of technology

The truth shall set us free

Digital revolution: a splash in the cognitive space?

How the individual invented the modern West

Brick is best

Great Books: The Sorrows of Satan by Marie Corelli

Great Books: I Viceré by Federico De Roberto

A very medieval cost of living crisis

Books of the Year

Information war does not exist

Kon Satoshi — animator of unmatched talent

Breaking the nuclear taboo

Reclaiming Christian freedom for the modern age

A Year in Ideas

In defence of shareholder democracy

Napoleon’s trouble on the home front

What does Xi Jinping really think?

Is there hope for Russia after Putin?

The Arab Awakening: when the dream met reality

Who created The Paintings for the Temple?

How a Second Cold War could have been averted

José Saramago was the master of reinvention

Bengal Opium: a study in continuity

Irina Ratushinskaya — Soviet dissident who fought the good fight

NATO is back

The White Revolutionaries

How 1970s California created the modern world

The Anonymous Canon

Cyprian Ekwensi: Lagos life in the raw

Karel Čapek’s robots took on a life of their own

In Defence of the Literary Critic

China-US rivalry risks dividing the EU

What Richard Wagner can tell us about the Wagner Group

Milan Kundera dreamt in Czech

Lessons for NATO from Ancient Greece’s Delian League

An Oceanic Order for the Twenty-First Century

Russian fortifications present an old problem for Ukraine

An ode to the ODNB

In pursuit of greatness: from Troy to Westminster

Democracy is no longer a ‘hurray-word’ in West Africa

Three victories and a defeat

The mythical Burma of Maurice Collis

Hegel’s philosophy of history

The enduring secret to Cyrus the Great’s success

The ins and outs of the European project

Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy revisited

Ukraine and the West: an alliance by proxy

Lucretius’ life-saving poem

How to make a nation

Contradictions at the heart of an expanding Europe

How Israel lost sight of its enemies

Israel’s new Yom Kippur

Canada’s Pacific railway: an iron spine for a paper nation

Commemorating Portugal’s ambiguous revolution

Ferdinand’s second life was the sweetest

Explaining the Golden Era

Armenia’s existential moment

The world in 2024

Kissinger: the ultimate realist

The long fall of the Slavic nation

Writing in the New Year

Grey zones and dark tourism in Europe’s hinterlands

Britain’s energy transition in the shadow of the 1970s

Fearing Russia’s futures

Sigmar Hillelson — the German Jewish pioneer behind the BBC’s Arabic broadcasts

Why Putin is haunted by the spectre of Polish power

Russia’s long imperial moment

A deep history of Canadian populism

My crush on cars

The sublime hubris of Tropical Modernism

A wild Winterreise

There are few winners in the wars for the Middle East

A Hollywood treasure trove

The history of sport contains multitudes

China and Russia: forever brothers?

How to do statecraft

Undersea cables and the vulnerability of American power

The madness of crowds

Did Tiberius have a grand strategy?

The bells, the bells

Venice, the serenely unclassifiable city

The Saddam files and the battle for Iraqi history

The Singapore way

Macron’s very French gambit

Why wars keep happening

How not to fight a war in Russia

The misfortunes of war

In search of Denmark’s soul

The agony and the ecstasy of Andy Murray

Ismail Kadare walked the line

Operetta’s world of invention

Europe’s contested borders by BMW

Abraham Lincoln’s warning against mob rule

The spires at the heart of French history

Imagining the endgame of the US-China rivalry

Post-apocalyptic nomads

Two assassinations and a region on the brink

Heavenly ambitions and earthly ruin: the lessons of the Taiping Rebellion

The Australian way of war and peace

Dumbarton Oaks: creating a new world order

Saxony and the return of the Third Germany

Resurrecting Mahler

Iran misfires, again

The life and deaths of Joseph Conrad

Learning the lessons of the 1982 Lebanon War

The beatification of Prigozhin and the fight for the future of Russia

The magic of Thomas Mann

Liberté and Laïcité

America’s European security dilemma is nothing new

Nasser’s children

The Monarchy International

Surrealism — a monstrous creation

The Syrian war never really ended

The heroes of Notre-Dame’s resurrection

Thomas Phelippes, the perfect Elizabethan spy

The rift that doomed the Confederacy

The hunchback of Mosul

The long struggle for Syria

In search of Mitteleuropa’s lost nobility

Russia’s Cold War Redux strategy for the Middle East lies in ruins

The crisis of progressivism

Remembering the true spirit of Christmas

Ghosts of the old Middle East

Podcasts v the written word

The quest for Croatia

Frederick Selous, the archetypal great white hunter

Infrastructure power

Ukraine alone

The betrayal of Ukraine

Pamela Harriman: an unsung hero of the Atlantic world

How to revive our reading culture

The perils of partition

Nicaea: the council that shaped the West

Europe’s last Latin kingdom

Interest rates, mankind’s greatest invention

The idea of Syria is worth saving

How a Republic falls

Must Europe always take every opportunity to miss an opportunity?

How the Young Turks became tyrants

Canada cannot escape geopolitics

Joachim Burwitz, spymaster of the Baltic world

Trump the caudillo

How the Vatican does geopolitics

The Church of the Almost Believers

Trump’s Syrian deal like no other

The high price of Trump’s energy

Whit Stillman’s comedies of manners

The Islamic Republic on the ropes

Israel and Iran square off

The battle for Syria isn’t over

Where is Russia’s place in the world?

The new right’s hollow aesthetic

How to renew world order

Lawrence Durrell’s lost Mediterranean

Iran’s forever crisis is far from over

Worldview — what is the future of the West?