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1488 results
How the British made the NHS their religion
essays
The decay and renewal of the American constitutional order
essays
The Revolt of the European Masses: the disintegration of accountability in supra-national politics
essays
Space and the new struggle for civilisational supremacy
essays
Iain Macleod — short-serving chancellor and lost Tory leader
portraits
Sigmar Hillelson — the German Jewish pioneer behind the BBC’s Arabic broadcasts
portraits
Russia in 2020: alternative scenarios of the near future
essays
Mobilising for the moment
essays
America’s problem with unconventional warfare
essays
Mental health’s expanding empire
book-review
The paradox of liberal individualism
essays
Internationalism’s moral fallacies
notebook
Future proof
essays
World order — improvised by design
essays
Realism meets reality
book-review
Challenging the ‘Great Reset’ theory of pandemics
essays
An Oceanic Order for the Twenty-First Century
essays
A government of laws
essays
Covid-19 and the moral case for personal judgement
essays
The Elizabethan era is laid to rest
essays
The roots of South Korea’s crisis
essays
Dumbarton Oaks: creating a new world order
essays
What does the future of evolution look like?
essays
The geopolitics and grand strategy of Alfred Thayer Mahan
essays
Doing our duty at home and abroad — A Duty of Care: Britain Before and After Covid by Peter Hennessy review
book-review
The constitutional casualties of the French election
notebook
Ancient lessons for modern crisis
essays
The Singapore way
essays
To avoid a dictatorship of scholars
essays
The return of great power diplomacy
essays
Rethinking the Meiji Restoration
essays
Inside the disinformation forever war
essays
Did civilisation add to the quality of human life?
essays
The US-Japan alliance – its past, present and unclear future
essays
Did nationalism exist in the classical world?
essays
America’s return as the reluctant defender of the liberal order
essays
Can democracy and genetic engineering co-exist?
essays
Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy revisited
essays
The forgotten lessons of First World War strategy
essays
The crusader of good will
essays
The West needs to wake up
essays
The Soviet military was a hollow colossus
essays
The endless frontier
essays
The Nation in Arms: Myth or reality?
essays
Why Finns Joined The Fight
essays
The Czechoslovak agent in the BBC who almost was
essays
The new struggle for space
essays
Towards an Arcadian future
essays
The fragile equilibrium of technology, liberty and power
essays
As the Arctic thaws, are we able to keep its peace?
essays
Human nature and European civilisation
essays
The future of war is here
essays
Foes into friends: Germany’s role in postwar European integration
essays
2020: Putting our pandemic in perspective
essays
Kamala Harris and the empty language of international order
notebook
From broken windows to bulldozers
essays
What the Paris Olympics opening ceremony really meant
notebook
The method and madness of Ancient Greek medicine
notebook
Trump’s gamble
notebook
The Bonn Summit and the road to globalisation
essays
Alternative international orders: a modern Holy Alliance for the twenty-first century
essays
Bringing beauty back to the city
essays
Erdogan prepares to leave the stage
essays
The Australian way of war and peace
essays
Battling for the best and brightest: immigration, great power rivalry, and the history of talent importation
essays
America – nation of myth-makers
essays
How America became the world’s Leviathan
book-review
1821 and the invention of world order
essays
Ruling the waves
essays
Why the nation beat the empire in the battle of 19th century ideas
essays
The Spy and the State
essays
When the Founding Fathers opposed the Supreme Court
notebook
How mechanical refrigeration changed the world
essays
How 1970s California created the modern world
essays
Why applied history matters
essays
The third way: How different is the Swedish model?
essays
Between Westernisers and Slavophiles – the search for Russia’s soul
essays
Regime change and the breaking of alliances
essays
Breaking the nuclear taboo
essays
Outside in, inside out: Russia as an empire on the periphery
essays
The carrot and the stick — geo-economics and Russian revisionism
essays
Fighting in the shadows
essays
Three victories and a defeat
essays
Vienna: the crucible of the modern world
essays
Globalisation: why it went into retreat
essays
This crisis has the capacity to be apocalyptic
essays
The paradox of nuclear strategy
essays
Geopolitics never went away for the United States
essays
The fake history of civilisational states
essays
Ukraine on the move: a century of migration
essays
China: The great uncoupling
essays
Syria’s rebels won the war – can they win the peace?
essays
America’s National Guard, a history of heroism and violence
notebook
How war created the nation state and yet could destroy it
essays
Contradictions at the heart of an expanding Europe
essays
A little history of the modern Middle East
essays
How China learned to love the bomb
essays
The Empire strikes back
essays
A real Russian heart: Aleksandr Dugin, Vladimir Putin and the dangerous new Russian ideology
essays
The Future of Europe: secular but not secularist, diverse but not divided
essays
The timely return of Henry Clay
notebook
The US President’s daily dose of intelligence
essays
The price of freedom
essays
Why wars keep happening
essays
Hong Kong’s secret world of spies
notebook
A political lesson from Lord Rockingham
portraits
Why Scotland lost its tongue
essays
The history of sport contains multitudes
essays
The fall and rise of Marwan Barghouti
essays
The twilight of the Arab state
essays
Why we don’t remember pandemics
notebook
The old republic of Europe
essays
To the far side of the Moon: the battle for lunar resources
essays
How Ukraine is winning in the adaptation battle against Russia
essays
Kissinger: the ultimate realist
essays
Reappraising NATO, 1956 style
essays
The flag wars are here to stay
essays
The subtle art of English comedy
essays
Russia’s Scramble for Africa
book-review
Meritocracy v the people
essays
The gerontology of power
essays
The war for hearts and minds: the evolution of al-Qaeda’s media strategy
essays
Undersea cables and the vulnerability of American power
essays
Le Pen and France’s past, present and future
notebook
The quest for Croatia
book-review
An ode to the ODNB
notebook
What is the purpose of existence?
essays
Islam and the contingency of politics
essays
The misfortunes of war
essays
Xi Jinping’s moment of truth
essays
Infrastructure power
essays
Continuity Thatcher: rescuing a complex leader from historical cliché
essays
The invention of Catherine the Great
essays
How the British elite lost its way
essays
Bond or Blofeld: war, espionage and secrecy in the twenty-first century
essays
The White Revolutionaries
essays
Digital revolution: a splash in the cognitive space?
essays
Can warfare ever be considered modern?
essays
The road to Auschwitz
book-review
The Balkan Question
essays
Towards a Westphalia for the Middle East
essays
The Sandbaggers: the greatest spy show ever?
notebook
Traitorous Blake motivated by Cold War convictions
essays
Total football — from catenaccio to gegenpressing it’s about openness to ideas
notebook
When disaster strikes
essays
Sport is more than just a game
essays
‘We need to see these terrorist groups through their own mindsets’ — in conversation with John Sawers
essays
The many meanings of culture
essays
Tradition meets aesthetics: the meaning of modern rituals
essays
From Saartjie Baartman to Dolly the Sheep: what does genetic integrity mean?
essays
The Slavic War according to Stalin
essays
From miracles to massacres – Japan’s tumultuous 20th century
essays
The Saddam files and the battle for Iraqi history
essays
Between frustrated Wagnerians and unsatisfied Schopenhauerians – what does Nietzsche reveal about decadence?
essays
Geopolitics of a pandemic
essays
The Arab Awakening: when the dream met reality
essays
The making of modern Ukraine
essays
The looming crisis of an Electoral College tie
notebook
A world of nations and states is here to stay
essays
How US policy failure post-9/11 undermined international order
essays
A tale of three generals — how the Ukrainian military turned the tide
essays
Tony Blair and the tragedy of liberal interventionism
essays
The indispensable foreign correspondent
essays
Power and prudence in American statecraft
book-review
Jacques Rueff’s quest for monetary order
essays
Seeing the big picture — how Russia’s past guides its grand strategy
essays
Imagining the endgame of the US-China rivalry
essays
What did it mean to belong to the Holy Roman Empire?
essays
The last days of the Fifth Republic
notebook
How companies go to war
essays
Rousseau and the barbarity of education
essays
Great Books: E.H. Carr’s Nationalism and After
book-review
Minority report
book-review
The making of an 18th-century peace deal
essays
Karel Čapek’s robots took on a life of their own
notebook
Wise warnings matter even more in this age of pandemics and big data
essays
Spies as agents of peace
essays
What is mistake theory and can it save the humanities?
essays
An uncertain idea of Britain
notebook
Welcome to the fifth age of the city
essays
Orwell in all weathers
notebook
How Jewish leaders have defied the political odds
notebook
Ukraine’s success in Kharkiv forced Putin’s hand
notebook
Learning from the big, bold 1990s debates over the post-Cold War world
notebook
Armenia’s existential moment
essays
The swift death of Gorbachev’s USSR set Russia on a path to chaos
essays
The Houthis’ forgotten war goes global
essays
Thucydides was a Realist
essays
The conflict between states and the US federal government is nothing new
notebook
Rewiring the world
essays
Japanese architecture – building the impossible
essays
Meet the Zoomer generation
essays
Why human agency matters
essays
Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin — the first and only British woman to win a Nobel Prize in science
portraits
The intelligent use of history — what is the past good for?
essays
The Caliphate: the persistence of a brutal ideology
essays
Four paths to Israel’s intelligence failure
notebook
Imperial Miasma Theory
essays
Hacktivism’s Cold War Turns Hot
essays
Books of the Year
book-review
Information war does not exist
essays
How to do statecraft
essays
American democracy can help fix America’s broken society
essays
The human need for war
essays
The restless search for fun wars
essays
Christopher Coker, 1953-2023
notebook
The idea of Syria is worth saving
notebook
Rethinking geopolitics
essays
Four reasons to study Polybius — most practical of ancient historians
essays
Liberty at risk as threats to freedom grow
essays
Finding Garibaldi
essays
The cultural conversation of mankind
essays
How Arcadia was won and lost and found again
essays
Christopher Lasch – contrarian critic of America’s elites
portraits
Geopolitics of the tempest
notebook
Books of the Year 2024
book-review
How private intelligence companies became the new spymasters
essays
The visionary potential of the Biblical legacy
essays
How to fix the future, Estonian style
essays
The deep historical roots of Russia’s militarisation of the Arctic
notebook
On civility
essays
John Perry Barlow and the struggle for the independence of cyberspace
essays
The new space race: Africa’s cosmic ambitions
essays
Inside Russia’s forever war against Ukraine
essays
On the myth of multiculturalism
essays
Why America goes to war
essays
Ukraine and the West: an alliance by proxy
notebook
Frederick Selous, the archetypal great white hunter
portraits
Can the US make the world safe for democracy?
essays
Nuclear war must become unthinkable — again
essays
Kharkiv’s culture unbowed
notebook
Trust is the key to geopolitical strength
essays
In the shadow of George Wallace: America’s third-party challenge
notebook
Lawrence of Arabia on war: How the past haunts the present
essays
Can Europe come to NATO’s defence?
essays
Macron’s very French gambit
notebook
Containing and deterring Russia: can Europe act strategically?
essays
Where does esotericism belong in modern academia and what is its purpose?
essays
Modern France and the ghosts of the past
essays
The strange death of private life
essays
What drives Vladimir Putin?
essays
The Passion of Hilma af Klint
essays
Dealing with the past – a Russian history
essays
Liberty under attack from enemies within
essays
The age of gerontocracy is nothing new
essays
Nehemiah Wallington – Puritan chronicler had far less fun than Pepys
portraits
Head, hand and heart
essays
Gustav Stresemann — The man who almost saved the world
portraits
How bro-world conquered America
essays
Getting the CIA in working order
book-review
The malevolent spirit of Ebrahim Raisi
notebook
The spies make their case
notebook
Five Eyes: the past, present and future of the world’s key intelligence alliance
essays
Kissinger: a man of three centuries
notebook
Jimmy Carter, orphan of the American Century
portraits
Eugene Onegin’s entropic beauty
book-review
Counting the cost of the 1918-19 pandemic
essays
Inside Russia’s forever war with the West
notebook
De Gaulle’s world in motion
essays
Georgian nightmare
essays
Ukraine, the future of war is now
notebook
Britain’s war requiem
essays
An intimate glimpse of President Trump
book-review
The Habsburg world we have lost
book-review
Why Assad’s fall took the world by surprise
notebook
Austria: nation, state or empire?
essays
How Israel reset the energy map
essays
The end of the Atlanticist Era
notebook
Japan, AUKUS and the future of Western defence
notebook
China’s innovation paradox
notebook
Inside the Collective Unconscious
essays
The Church of the Almost Believers
essays
The problem of power in Russia
essays
The past, an enduring guide to the future
essays
The revolutionary meaning of Maundy Thursday
notebook
Equality – what is it good for?
essays
Is there hope for Russia after Putin?
essays
The vitality of Western civilisation
essays
How the state can do more for less
essays
Charles Johnston: British diplomat who used a poet’s eye to fix the final phase of empire
portraits
The high price of Trump’s energy
notebook
Democracy in crisis: Lessons from Ancient Athens
essays
Noël Coward the spy
portraits
How LBJ stepped back
notebook
Henry Kissinger at 100: a century of service
notebook
Richard Aldington — the war poet who rejected moral certainties about conflict
portraits
Kafka’s goodbye to Berlin
notebook
How to revive our reading culture
notebook
The triumph of the Motherland
essays
Sir Alexander Cadogan — Churchill’s indispensable man
portraits
The Queen, Stoicism and the defence of the Faith
notebook
America must find its middle ground
notebook
Pope Leo XIII, steward of a vanished world
portraits
The story of the Jesuits — how the Society of Jesus charted the world
essays
Robert Adam and building beautiful
essays
On guard: the contemporary salience of military fortification
essays
George Orwell’s idea of civilisation
essays
The Platinum Jubilee — the joys of Pomp and Circumstance
notebook
Ukraine can win the peace
essays
How to negotiate with China
essays
Terror, misperception and America’s road to Iraq
book-review
The enduring mystery of the Zinoviev Letter
notebook
EI Weekly Listen — Andrew Preston on the invention of American national security
podcasts
EI Weekly Listen — Philip Bobbitt on the decay and renewal of the US constitutional order
podcasts
Europe’s reckoning with history
notebook
Irrational Rationalists: Pythagoras matters
notebook
J.M. Coetzee’s absence without leave
notebook
Is our religion of love doing more harm than good?
essays
Great Power competition is going nuclear again
essays
Joe Biden and the long shadow of the Vietnam War
essays
France fragmented
notebook
1975, the year that made the modern world
essays
Yosano Akiko — a great of modern Japanese poetry
portraits
Making sense of the Yemen War
essays
George Carver, the CIA’s man in Vietnam
portraits
The march of the sovereign individuals
notebook
The gods in love
essays
Hamas takes the nihilistic path of Islamist terror
notebook
Britain’s energy transition in the shadow of the 1970s
essays
Why Putin is haunted by the spectre of Polish power
essays
Europe needs a grand strategy
essays
Navigating the new nuclear age
notebook
Christianity in a cold climate – Jesuit encounters with Japan
essays
Ernest Bevin and the spiritual dimension of British foreign policy
essays
What makes a man die for his country?
essays
Who’s seeing your data and why?
essays
The world that saltpetre built
essays
Will machines make strategy?
essays
Peak China may be closer than we think
notebook
In search of Lebensraum
essays
When did sexual decadence lose its association with social decline?
essays
Daniel Patrick Moynihan: Warrior of the liberal centre
portraits
The Monarchy International
book-review
What pushed Sweden away from socialism?
notebook
Walk on the wild side
book-review
Inside the world of medieval espionage
essays
Reassessing Christian history
essays
Matisse’s second life
book-review
Confucius, competition and modern China’s misuse of meritocracy
essays
The golden age of the supernatural
book-review
Betty Webb, the humble codebreaker who helped to defeat the Nazis
portraits
Know your enemy
essays
Angus MacLean – father, soldier, liberator
portraits
Canada cannot escape geopolitics
essays
The bitter legacy of Israel’s West Bank settlement
essays
Fighting for freedom against the odds
essays
The quest for an American honours system
notebook
The economy and the paradox of technology
essays
History while it’s still smoking
essays
Globalisation — lessons from George Canning on how to remake trade
essays
Gazing back to see China’s future
essays
The Stalinist who wrote the playbook for French foreign policy
notebook
The People’s Republic of SF
essays
Palestine, pragmatism and the lessons of 1956
essays
Russia’s century of scientific autarky
essays
History shows a perilous path lies ahead for Kamala Harris
essays
Saxony and the return of the Third Germany
essays
A team of rivals empowers a president
notebook
Russia’s global grip on nuclear energy
notebook
When free trade falters
essays
Joachim Burwitz, spymaster of the Baltic world
portraits
Troubled waters
essays
Middle Powers: don’t write off Britain and Japan
notebook
Jane the Virgin: Metafictional telenovela par excellence
notebook
The trials of a president
essays
Conducting is Finland’s soft superpower
notebook
Putin’s Game: How did so many in the West get Russia so wrong?
essays
Locked arms: looming threats to the Romania-NATO partnership
notebook
City-states are back
notebook
Geopolitics — the key to understanding Russia foreign policy
essays
The Eurasian Century, Part IV: Cold War
essays
How manga shapes Japanese identity
essays
Ignacio Sánchez Mejías — sensationalist matador who brought celebrity to the corrida
portraits
Have Realists lost their way?
book-review
AI’s attention deficit
essays
Fiction for a future war
essays
Why do democracies decay?
essays
What does Xi Jinping really think?
essays
The Entente Cordiale: bad history but good politics
essays
Puccini’s battle of darkness and light
notebook
Will AI revolutionise education?
essays
Playing with demons — how thought experiments guide scientific innovation
essays
The West needs to boost its industrial capacity fast
notebook
The centrist as saviour
notebook
In search of Mitteleuropa’s lost nobility
book-review
Living with the Great Plague of 1665
essays
Macaulay and the lost optimism of Victorian history
essays
Untold knowledge: the price of deforestation
essays
The dissident’s dilemma
essays
Spirit-lands and tyrant-kings: differing tales of statehood
essays
Russia’s tragedy is a warning to us all
essays
Taking Pushkin off his pedestal
essays
Japan’s time of monsters
essays
The beatification of Prigozhin and the fight for the future of Russia
essays
The new great power competition for minerals
notebook
The art of Siena: a question of perspective
book-review
Alasdair MacIntyre’s philosophy for a new dark age
notebook
George McGhee – American father to Britain’s Suez Crisis
portraits
The mythical Burma of Maurice Collis
notebook
Fritz Mannheimer – stockbroker of peace
portraits
Authority without knowledge
essays
Tobias Smollett – a life in caricature
portraits
Queen Elizabeth II — the end of a glorious reign
notebook
Napoleonic Europe: how the Emperor built a continent
essays
Russell Leffingwell – guardian of the American century
portraits
Leadership in crisis – why the West needs Plato more than ever
essays
From the Silk Road to the information superhighway
essays
Information loss
essays
Lifting Italy’s classical music curse
essays
Banishing Pétain’s ghost
book-review
Israel’s hostage dilemma
notebook
Julian ‘the Apostate’: antiquity’s most prolific self-publicist
book-review
Ismail Kadare walked the line
essays
Margaret Thatcher – the fall, thirty years on
essays
Ernest Benn against the Census and the forces of Bumbledom
notebook
The honourable men of the House of Morgan – J.P Morgan & Co and the Crisis of Capitalism by Martin Horn review
book-review
In defence of the Habsburgs
essays
Decline in three dimensions
essays
Careless posts cost lives
notebook
Civilisation and Auschwitz are not a contradiction in terms
essays
History’s soundtrack: America’s swinging musical diplomacy
notebook
The greatest sportsman you have never heard of
notebook
What Israel does next — in conversation with Dennis Ross
notebook
Did the Enlightenment fail?
book-review
The long war between Israel and Hizbollah
essays
The hidden lives of Samurai women
essays
The many ways of seeing Saint Monica
portraits
Enid Bagnold — trailblazing novelist whose greatest novel launched Elizabeth Taylor’s career
portraits
EI Weekly Listen — the fake history of civilisational states by Christopher Coker
podcasts
EI Weekly Listen — The Revolt of the European Masses: the disintegration of accountability in supra-national politics by Janne Haaland Matlary
podcasts
The enduring spirit of cricket
notebook
The other side of the hill
essays
The Suez Canal Purchase and the making of modern Britain
essays
Armenia, Azerbaijan on the brink – again
notebook
The end of history ends
essays
Thomas Jefferson’s spirit of scientific endeavour is what America needs today
essays
The beginning of a reckoning: the Middle East after 7 October
essays
America’s retreat from free trade
book-review
The Genocide Convention and its discontents
notebook
A Russian nation struggles to be born
notebook
The importance of the individual in history
essays
China’s takeover of Western capitalism
essays
Adam Smith: the first anti-capitalist?
essays
Chemical weapons and war: the growing threat
notebook
Show goes on for Ukrainian opera
notebook
Will Georgia’s geopolitical hedging pay off?
essays
Who are the Basques?
notebook
South Korea’s crisis could be a geopolitical catastrophe
notebook
The price of Iran’s nuclear prestige
essays
Why liberal democracies win total wars
essays
German resistance to sending Leopards will be long remembered
notebook
Epic news
essays
Do we really know what war is anymore? — The Weaponisation of Everything: A Field Guide To The New Way of War by Mark Galeotti review
book-review
Reclaiming Christian freedom for the modern age
essays
Vienna’s vapour trail
book-review
JFK’s abiding legacy
essays
Inside Iran’s election circus
notebook
The crisis of progressivism
essays
A most rebellious territory
essays
Peter Viereck: Psychoanalyst of Nazism
portraits
The fraught history of the presidential pardon
notebook
Pamela Harriman: an unsung hero of the Atlantic world
portraits
Decolonising Britain’s countryside
book-review
When Dickens made his masterpiece
essays
Baudelaire grappling with God
notebook
Resilient London will regenerate
notebook
The spirit of Hilary Mantel
notebook
Irina Ratushinskaya — Soviet dissident who fought the good fight
portraits
Was Horace a town or a country mouse?
notebook
The magic of Thomas Mann
notebook
Privacy Policy
page
The beginning of the end for the Cambridge Five
notebook
General James Oglethorpe — a man of uncommon vivacity
portraits
The shifting fortunes of IS-Khorasan
book-review
The City of God: on Augustine’s vision of Empire
essays
Business burble doesn’t beat real historical understanding
notebook
The Slow Horses are Britain’s perfect spies
essays
Was Richard Sorge the perfect spy?
portraits
The shadow of Chiang Kai-shek and the struggle for Taiwanese identity
notebook
Celebrating a century of the red telephone box
notebook
The anatomy of the spy novel
essays
Everything is not really okay in Afghanistan
book-review
God is back
essays
Why Jihadists write poetry
essays
Oswald Spengler – an intellectual life
portraits
Abba and engineering: how Swedish music took over the world
notebook
What if Bach and Handel had met?
notebook
The roots of cyber security lie in the City of London
notebook
Prisoner of Putin
notebook
How to make a nation
book-review
Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, the uncrowned King of Poland
portraits
Irish neutrality is unsustainable
notebook
The French Revolution and the making of the Counter-Enlightenment
essays
Blood on the Tracks turns 50
notebook
Will Trump’s Golden Age be a Gilded one?
notebook
The roots of America’s oil anxiety
notebook
Syria’s sectarian trap
notebook
Eisenhower’s vision of European security
notebook
How Nato can defend the Atlantic
notebook
First in their field — the men and women possessed by the spirit of adventure
book-review
EI Weekly Listen — Pascal Vennesson on the rise of transnational war-making
podcasts
Somaliland’s race for recognition
notebook
Making Poland great again
notebook
Basil Liddell Hart and the Art of Peace
portraits
Europe’s contested borders by BMW
notebook
Europe’s last Latin kingdom
essays
Sweden and Finland forced into the NATO fold by Russia
notebook
How ideology transformed the early modern individual
essays
The old man: the political genius who made Singapore
essays
Israel’s new Yom Kippur
essays
Explaining the Golden Era
notebook
The sublime hubris of Tropical Modernism
book-review
America’s European security dilemma is nothing new
essays
Lebanon’s ceasefires without end
notebook
Nazism’s downfall and the aftermath of war
essays
Machiavelli and the benefits of civil strife
essays
China rethinking its role
essays
Do we know the truth about the Thirty Years’ War?
essays
Jean Denis, Comte Lanjuinais – fearless opponent of The Terror
portraits
Painting the invisible
essays
World Cup has revealed the real Lionel Messi
notebook
Russia, America and the roads not taken
essays
EI Weekly Listen — Philip Bobbitt on the new global disorder
podcasts
India sends Modi a message
notebook
Operetta’s world of invention
book-review
The European Union’s coming ideological crisis
notebook
Ukraine in Kursk: a lesson in strategic audacity
notebook
Mozambique at the crossroads
notebook
Bruce Springsteen’s Spanish love affair
essays
Artists of the floating world
essays
Fire in the sky — a history of meteoritics
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Made in Taiwan: How Developing Countries Can Leverage High Tech
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The many worlds of Peter Brown
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Venezuela’s Essequibo gamble
notebook
A deep history of Canadian populism
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In search of Denmark’s soul
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The perils of partition
notebook
The American dream making a come back
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Algorithms vs Humanity
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Rudolf II: Habsburg hoarder, failed leader and Renaissance collector
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The Vault of Heaven: Silvio Berlusconi’s final resting place
notebook
Eleanor of Provence, a force to be reckoned with
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China’s AI Sputnik moment is not what it seems
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On dandyism
essays
Jesse Ventura – the wrestling governor who blazed a trail for Trump
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A Year in Ideas
essays
How a Second Cold War could have been averted
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Jules Verne’s paradoxes of progress
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The world in 2024
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South Korea between the great powers
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Gardens for all
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Gustaf Mannerheim, leader of a free Finland
portraits
Tunisia turns away from democracy
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On the dangers of sleep
notebook
On ostracism
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EI Weekly Listen – Mark Honigsbaum: Challenging the ‘Great Reset’ theory of pandemics
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How it all went wrong for Stephen Tomlin
book-review
Daniel Defoe’s journeys of the mind
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A little history of Shin Bet
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Securing Scandinavia
notebook
The medieval world’s Baltic connection
essays
Britain’s man inside Hitler’s inner circle
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Philippa Fawcett – wrangler extraordinaire
portraits
Elizabeth the Dutiful
notebook
Inside Mossad
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The transatlantic alliance is fractured, not broken
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Krystyna Skarbek, Churchill’s favourite spy
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Étienne Clavière – the revolutionary who hated revolution
portraits
Singing Byrd in a cage
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The Teddy Boys’ two-fingered salute
book-review
Palau – 5 November’s other election
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The helicopter, symbol of American hubris
essays
Victor Hugo’s ideal of Europe
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Russian history rhymes — from Soviet collapse to Putin’s folly
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The lost art of listening
notebook
An innovative analysis of global terrorism — Western Jihadism: A Thirty Year History by Jytte Klausen review
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Element of surprise — the West needs to be more unpredictable
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Binding order and liberty: Tocqueville the politician
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Tsiang Tingfu – pre-revolutionary China’s last bridge with the West
portraits
Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan — for Xi, it’s personal
notebook
The moderate life of Decimus Magnus Ausonius
portraits
Upstairs, downstairs, demolished – the changing fate of the English country house
essays
Against pasta: remembering The Manifesto of Futurist Cooking
notebook
Disraeli and the Rothschilds provide a study in the power of political patronage
notebook
Larkin, prophet of postmodernism
book-review
When JS Bach came to Leipzig
notebook
Islam, India and the question of class
essays
Russian fortifications present an old problem for Ukraine
essays
Paolo Sarpi: opponent of papal power
portraits
On Jewish identity
notebook
The long fall of the Slavic nation
essays
Space architecture: a moonage daydream?
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How Beate Klarsfeld grappled with Europe’s demons
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Ukraine alone
notebook
Interest rates, mankind’s greatest invention
essays
Erdogan’s pious generation takes to the streets
notebook
The merits of a wartime mentality
notebook
The Gospel of Thomas: casting a new light on Early Christianity
essays
EI Weekly Listen — America’s problem with unconventional warfare by Frederick Kagan
podcasts
EI Weekly Listen — How US policy failure post-9/11 undermined international order by Emma Sky
podcasts
The Rhinegold, Wagner’s other comedy
notebook
Europe’s eastward march
essays
Putin’s Russia is a nuclear outlaw
essays
Putin’s Poison Pill
notebook
Putin’s propaganda is parroting Al-Qaeda’s anti-Western grievances
notebook
Rewriting Spanish history, one song at a time
essays
Jean Eustache: the outsider who reshaped French cinema
portraits
Argentina’s post-Peronist future
notebook
A Cold War with Chinese characteristics
essays
The deep history and dangers of just wars
essays
Inside Sudan’s forever war
essays
Germany stands by the rule of law in the Baltic
notebook
Yugoslavia and the ghosts of nationalism
notebook
Dürer in Venice
notebook
Olympe de Gouges: the recalcitrant revolutionary
portraits
God Bless America: A Short History of the Super Bowl Halftime Show
notebook
How the idea of America changed Britain
essays
Can nuclear deterrence preserve the Long Peace between major powers?
essays
Putin sees himself as engaged in an existential war with the West
notebook
Dance first, think afterwards
book-review
Why Zelenskyy fired Zaluzhnyi
notebook
The true sources of Soviet conduct
book-review
Sinwar’s death among the ruins
notebook
How Iran’s Tanker War shaped Trump’s worldview
notebook
The power of the Blue Marble
notebook
Paul Kennedy in conversation on the rise of a new era of great power competition
essays
Myths and realities of Putinism and NATO expansion
essays
New Turkey’s old politics
essays
Statecraft for an age of blood and iron — The Strategy of Denial: American Defence in an Age of Great Power Conflict by Elbridge Colby review
book-review
Ancient creations: from the Antikythera Mechanism to Western music
essays
Chiang Ching-kuo — dictator or democrat?
portraits
Hostile neighbours and a parallel path: why Japan and Germany are rearming
essays
Haiti and the pathos of history
essays
Charles III — why not make him King-Emperor of Europe?
notebook
Germany in Europe: the engine that couldn’t
essays
Russia’s quest for polar power
notebook
China-US rivalry risks dividing the EU
essays
Attlee’s shadow
book-review
Surrealism — a monstrous creation
book-review
The Germans and their cars: history of a love affair
essays
After Hilma af Klint: the influence of Theosophy on contemporary art
essays
Russia’s shadow war for Eastern Europe
notebook
The politics of China’s purges
notebook
Sylvia Beach, the bookseller who defied the Nazis
portraits
John Craxton’s art of living
book-review
De László’s portraits of society still matter
notebook
The strange death of Scotland’s political virtues
notebook
More than just a moment: the deep roots of American populism
notebook
Our attention dilemma is age-old
essays
The other plot to kill Hitler
book-review
How Russia and Iran have united in antipathy towards the West
essays
Khorloogiin Choibalsan — Stalin of the steppe
portraits
Janusz Korczak — the Old Doctor of Warsaw
portraits
Where has ‘the good life’ gone?
essays
Kids these days
notebook
Are we ready for the new humans?
book-review
Giovanni Bellini, the soul of Venice
book-review
Crusading women
book-review
The Nazis’ last victims
book-review
All hail King Zog?
book-review
The psychedelic renaissance
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Christianity’s carnal contradictions
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The Trump effect
notebook
The Napoleonic myth of la méritocratie
notebook
The British have lost the art of eating out
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Thomas Phelippes, the perfect Elizabethan spy
portraits
The art and science of intelligence in war
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After the Flood: Boulanger’s creation myth restored
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The secrets of the special relationship
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In defence of the city-state
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John le Carré: the timeless allure of a true literary great
notebook
Remembering Liu Xiaobo’s moral critique of modern China
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Robert Louis Stevenson knew about guerrilla warfare
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Frank Kitson and the myth of the counter-insurgent
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Spies, lies and empires
book-review
China and America, the great decoupling
notebook
Europe’s lost peasant utopias
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Alexander Helphand — impresario of revolutionary disaster who smoothed Lenin’s return to Russia
portraits
Uruk and the origins of the sacred economy
essays
America’s Afghan reckoning
notebook
Parallel visionaries – Hilla Rebay and Hilma af Klint
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A ship without a captain — Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union by Vladislav Zubok review
book-review
Ukraine is the latest disaster in a long history of Russian military dysfunction
notebook
Inventing the Samurai
essays
The aesthetic harmony of Japanese nature
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Why do politicians get energy policy wrong?
essays
On tea
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Plautus punching up: a different class of comedy
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How War Made Odessa More Ukrainian
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Epitaph on a mafioso’s grave
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The ins and outs of the European project
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Yet another flight across the Durand Line
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When everything is empire
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How the Nazis weaponised Charlemagne
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The wages of Putin’s war
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Going with the grain: the rise and fall of the Roman market
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How advertising consumed the counter-culture
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The Statue of Liberty’s Egyptian origins
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The Knights Templars and the pursuit of Christendom
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The perils of Russian stability under Putin
notebook
In conversation with Fiona Hill on Donald Trump’s nuclear nightmares
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Crisis, settlement, or containment — what is to be done on Russia?
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The case for a geopolitics of tragedy
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Macron stands apart from the United States – and Europe
notebook
Caravaggio’s last stand
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The death of Tsarist Russia and the creation of modern Ukraine
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The UN has failed Lebanon
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The Kaiser and the Nazis
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Marine Le Pen’s reckoning
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What should we do when the terrorists go quiet?
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Geopolitics and the Mongol Empire
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The first Yugoslav
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Show’s over: the case against a cultural boycott of Russia
notebook
The century of the gene
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Why bittersweet beats SOUR
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Good poetry in a crisis
notebook
Survival lessons from Ancient Rome
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The birth of theosophy
essays
Heinrich Biber — composer of rapture and ravings
portraits
Roger Federer rose above our frenetic times
notebook
French and British cinema in wartime: subtlety against the odds
notebook
The liberation of France made the modern world
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John Hersey’s lasting testament
book-review
Fearing Russia’s futures
essays
How China made it
book-review
Mullā Ṣadrā, Islam’s greatest modern philosopher
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Italy’s dubbing delusions
notebook
Tehran’s endgame
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The triumph and tragedy of Yukio Mishima
essays
Must Europe always take every opportunity to miss an opportunity?
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John Law, the man who blew up the French economy
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William Shockley — accidental inventor of Silicon Valley
portraits
Unipolar America: another imperial delusion ends
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What the Silicon Valley idealists got wrong
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The Joint Intelligence Committee: Reading the Russian mindset
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Time running out in China’s waiting game — The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order by Rush Doshi review
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Rosaleen Norton — joyful contrarian and occultist turned pioneer for free speech
portraits
War displaces Ukrainians – again
notebook
Valeriy Lobanovskyi: The greatest football coach you’ve never heard of
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A world without glamorous Shanghai is the poorer for it
notebook
The joy of suffering
essays
Defeat in Ukraine dooms Putin’s distorted historical worldview
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Simon Leys — the cosmopolitan scholar who broke the rules of Sinology
portraits
Cyprian Ekwensi: Lagos life in the raw
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Mustang: the heart of Nepal’s China dream
notebook
Airports have changed – for the worse
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Russia’s unbearable frontline burden
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The terrible dilemmas of leadership in a thermonuclear world
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America cannot ignore the Middle East
notebook
What the Romans did for the US
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Books of the Year 2023
book-review
J.G.A. Pocock’s roads not taken
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The magic of Merchant Ivory
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Six Tudor lives in their own right
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The agony and the ecstasy of Andy Murray
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Unpicking imperial history
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Heavenly ambitions and earthly ruin: the lessons of the Taiping Rebellion
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The Syrian war never really ended
notebook
The era of Taylor Swift
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Ghosts of the old Middle East
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Sweden’s Zeitenwende
notebook
Iranian cinema against the Islamic Republic
book-review
Reading the map of love
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Russia digging in for a long war with the West
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Four steps to surviving the Russia crisis
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The eighteenth-century technological awakening of artist adventurers
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Remembering Wilhelm Furtwängler
notebook
Sweden’s swinging sixties
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In defence of shareholder democracy
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When the Samurai came to America
notebook
In Praise of The Fast Show
notebook
The double agent who introduced Japan to the West
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The squandered promise of Willie Wilde
portraits
Fanfare for Ukraine
notebook
Gerald of Wales, chronicler of the Celtic world
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The last chance for Sudan
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Reform and the long shadow of the Fourth Party
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The tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV
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Giovannino Guareschi: Italian Orwell
portraits
Joe Biden and the attractions of Augustine
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Crisis and the creation of great art
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Raïssa Maritain: more than a mystic
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Learning from Asian philosophies of rebirth
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The truth shall set us free
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Chequered history of ministries of all the talents
notebook
Benedict XVI: God’s Rottweiler, the Pope who retired
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The Vedic Canon
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The fight to save the trees of Paris
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The creative industrial complex
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1524: The year beer came to England
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The life and deaths of Joseph Conrad
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Versailles’ splendour unbounded
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The 18th century way of war
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book-review
Mrs Dalloway’s war wounds
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EI Talks… a new world of intelligence
podcasts
Testament to doomed media
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How Tolstoy immortalised Russia’s Caucasus forever war
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A glimpse of Edwardian splendour
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Aspasia of Miletus – queen of the Athenian salon
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Joseph Leclerc du Tremblay – the original éminence grise
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Spartacus, history’s nowhere man
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The special role that never was
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Marion Dönhoff: the very best of Germany
notebook
The enduring secret to Cyrus the Great’s success
essays
The dark spectacle of American political violence
notebook
New towns, old problems
notebook
‘Slippery Sam’ — Britain’s man in Madrid
portraits
Illuminated by Sidney Lumet, beyond reasonable doubt
notebook
The war against printing
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Klára Dán — esoteric intellect who wrote the first modern computer code
portraits
‘Everything is Ukraine’ — Ukraine’s long search for a homeland
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Joseph Galloway – the forgotten Founding Father
portraits
The Middle East: Kissinger’s masterpiece?
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Olympism: magic, myths and mega-events
notebook
The Gospel according to Judas
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Great Books: I Viceré by Federico De Roberto
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Sanctions as potent yet unwieldy weapons of war
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The year the West woke up
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The Kremlin has its eyes on Gagauzia
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A Roman Feast
book-review
Laughing with the Face of God
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Pensions in a time of kings
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The true genius of automata
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Quintus Fabius Cunctator: a general who stands askew in the pantheon of Roman heroes
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Edwin Walker: deep-state conspirator
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Canada’s Pacific railway: an iron spine for a paper nation
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Commemorating Portugal’s ambiguous revolution
notebook
Interwar architecture was much more than modernism
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The magnificent unreality of Barbara Comyns
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Messiaen’s many mutations
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How women made Benjamin Disraeli
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The Olympic moment
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Why do we get the wrong leaders?
essays
Learning the lessons of the 1982 Lebanon War
notebook
The Great French Songbook
essays
The tragic decline of Christian rituals
notebook
India’s new iconoclasts
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Martin Luther’s wise protector
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The intoxicating humanism of Truffaut’s Les 400 Coups
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Fantasy in Middle Eastern nation-making
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The miracle of refugee musicians
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The Eurasian Century, Part I: What Mackinder Knew
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The Eurasian Century, Part V: Beijing’s Gambit
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Elizabeth Thompson — military artist whose star rose and fell with the British Empire
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EI Weekly Listen — What did it mean to belong to the Holy Roman Empire?
podcasts
EI Weekly Listen — Geopolitics never went away for the United States
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Worldview — The future of the museum
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Worldview — The Return of Applied History
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Czechoslovakia at the centre of history
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EI Talks… Machiavelli
podcasts
A musical masterpiece
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EI Talks… Israel’s harrowing week and the consequences for the Middle East
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Can Erdogan keep up his Middle East balancing act?
notebook
EI Talks… Tecumseh and the Shawnee Confederacy
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Flights of fantasy
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EI Weekly Listen — Yu Jie on the deep historical roots of China’s global ambition
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How LBJ forged the US-Israel alliance
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How numbers came to Europe
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EI Weekly Listen — David Frum on how empire-states are changing the game
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EI Talks… Caravaggio
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Learning the right lessons from Ukraine’s naval war
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The Holy Alliance was doomed to be brittle
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EI Portraits — Rana Mitter on Tsiang Tingfu, pre-revolutionary China’s last bridge with the West
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EI Weekly Listen — Kentaro Fujimoto on Japan’s global future
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EI Weekly Listen — Kristin Ven Bruusgaard on the paradox of nuclear strategy
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EI Talks… why Europe needs a grand strategy with Marina E. Henke
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EI Weekly Listen — Andreas Rödder on Konrad Adenauer and the German realignment
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The pitfalls of hindsight
notebook
What Zelensky can learn from Syngman Rhee
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The making of Trump’s worldview
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China vs the WTO: The Inside Story
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The West’s lust for liberty
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Learning in Italy
notebook
Macron’s France is remaking itself again
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The nuclear dilemma: deterrence works, up to a point
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History shows revolutions are a disaster
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Empire and development in First Millennium Europe
essays
HIMARS permit Ukrainians to fight how they know best — a strategy of corrosion
notebook
A garden of schizophrenics
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Blessed are the cheesemakers
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Putin bets the Russia house on the Donbas rustbelt
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The two Elizabeths
notebook
The Eurasian Century, Part III: The Totalitarian Challenge
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How the West can drive a wedge between India and Russia
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John Hughes and the making and unmaking of the American dream
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Putin’s land war — cautionary lessons from Ancient Greece
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Low power: how self-sufficient Sweden jeopardised its energy security
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Meteorites: our fascination with the ultimate antique
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How Elizabeth II created the role of the modern monarch
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A brief history of the fatwa
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Worldview — what is the future of the West?
podcasts
How the individual invented the modern West
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EI Weekly Listen — Towards a Westphalia for the Middle East by Brendan Simms
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Can Epic Poetry Revive History?
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Beware the Ides of August
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The rise and fall of the Creek Confederacy
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An endless dialogue between past and present
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A paean to Shane MacGowan
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Conservatism and the sceptical enlightenment
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Russia: Nation of floods
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A Hollywood treasure trove
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Venezuela faces the music
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The worlds of the Japanese woodblock
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Censorship in the cradle of democracy
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Kate Bush, English lionheart
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Russia’s North Korean connection
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America’s historical overload
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Greenland: Denmark’s post-colonial dilemma
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The status quo powers strike back
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What happened to the politician’s moustache?
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England’s unusual individualism
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A tale of two Congos
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Trump the caudillo
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Southeast Asia – between Trump and China
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How the Vatican does geopolitics
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The rise of the gerontocrats
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Italy the mediator’s crush on Russia
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The future of war: embrace the new, remember the old
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Human behaviour will still determine who wins wars
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The dark side to loving a group
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The geopolitical fight to come over green energy
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Imperial Germany – mighty aristocracy or modern meritocracy?
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John McDonald – poker-playing popularizer of game theory
portraits
Brick is best
notebook
In Defence of the Literary Critic
book-review
György Kurtág contemplates his endgame
book-review
Lucretius’ life-saving poem
essays
How history’s quest for truth became a call to action
essays
2023: The revenge of history
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Roald Dahl’s readable but regrettable Uncle Oswald
notebook
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and the humanity of history
notebook
The lost worlds of Raphael Samuel
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Cinematic journeys in old-time Finland
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The founding father of a future Russia
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Orkney: ‘the most dangerous place of all Christendom’
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An early modern guide to information overload
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War and the Proms
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Archives among the ashes
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How the Print Revolution created a market of ideas
essays
The West’s year of living anxiously
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Bob Dylan, the last of the best
book-review
The use and abuse of the Cuban Missile Crisis
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Turner’s genius for technology
notebook
On squalor
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Gatsby, still great at 100
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How monks shaped Christendom
book-review
Why we make lists
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Champagne supernova
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For the love of wine
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Tender is the night
notebook
Philip Thicknesse — libertine turned ornamental hermit
portraits
The beauty of municipal swimming pools
notebook
On Richelieu’s cats
notebook
Inauguration and the power of American ritual
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Painting by numbers
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A little history of the Fierce Goddess
notebook
The ancient Egyptians and birds — history of a fascination
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Nouvelle Cuisine made food better
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Napoleon’s trouble on the home front
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How the GDR fell in love with the West
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On the Road with Alexis de Tocqueville
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A New Breed of Hobby Horse
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Folke Hero
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Grey zones and dark tourism in Europe’s hinterlands
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The making of Xi Jinping, China’s absolute monarch
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The looming battle for succession in Iran
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At the crossroads of religion and science
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Why children eat books up
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Wild stories of medieval women
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The decline and fall of period drama
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The Great Siege of Malta through Ottoman eyes
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The spiritual world of The White Lotus
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Wandering through the Carpathian Mountains
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The maverick genius of Georges Bizet
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England’s mystical inheritance
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The invention of suburbia
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What Mary Shelley did in the shadows
book-review
Cookie Policy
page
Late Beauties of the British Empire
essays
MI9 – Helen Fry on wartime escape
podcasts
ChatGPT: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
notebook
The fight for the heart of Istanbul
notebook
The Wars of the Roses and the problem with private armies
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The ‘secretaries’ of MI6
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We are legion
book-review
How not to fight a war in Russia
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The price of fairness
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René of Anjou — an Arthurian king
portraits
Stuck in Herbert’s Temple
notebook
‘The Day Of The Jackal’: How far was fiction from reality?
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The right path — the complexities of transporting lethal aid to Ukraine
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The passion of Bach
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The true history of the Wagner Group
book-review
Why dictators fall
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Blinded by the light
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The cloak-and-dagger intrigue of Italian presidential elections
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Why Jihadis are drawn to Khorasan
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Akinpelu Obisesan — a gentleman diarist in colonial Africa
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Digital dictatorship: a brutal examination of the UAE
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The world that Vasco da Gama built
essays
The strong armed philosophy of the Chinese state isn’t new
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Brendan Bracken – ‘more Churchillian than Churchill’
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Cubans are losing their fear
notebook
You are not as clever as you think
essays
Technology transfer across the ages
essays
Ukraine and Russia: how closeness turned into war
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George Orwell’s idea of technology
notebook
When artists retrain
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Fighting back against Russia — the return of propaganda
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Spoken history: the modern importance of indigenous cultures
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Inside Cromwell’s New Model Army
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Between Hitler and Mussolini: The agony of Pope Pius XII
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Anti-nuclear bomb Germany changing its mind
notebook
Germany’s 1960s slide into political violence is a warning
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Great Books: William Golding’s The Spire
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The new Warsaw Pact
essays
How Classics captured the Chinese imagination
book-review
In defence of architecture
book-review
The Return of Russia’s Soviet Past
notebook
In pursuit of greatness: from Troy to Westminster
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Italy’s strangely seductive culture of mediocrity
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Crossing America’s big country
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OpenAI’s dual personality disorder
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The paradoxes of Ireland’s imperial past
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Martin Niemöller’s stand against Hitler
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Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell – visions of a vanished Britain
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For the common good
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A too democratic university
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When Edo became Tokyo
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Music in Auschwitz
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Charles Lamb’s literary alter ego
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The revolt of Germany’s working class
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Cecil Beaton’s gardens of Eden
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Thomas Mann’s cathedrals in prose
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Whit Stillman’s comedies of manners
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The secret life of hemp
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Italy: Mother of all invention
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Putin needs ‘General Frost’ on his side to win in Ukraine
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Why the idea of Carthage survived Roman conquest
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Swedish leaders and a lesson in hubris
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Duality, determinism and demography: The Greeks on geopolitics
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Shaping society — The Making of Our Urban Landscape by Geoffrey Tyack review
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Great Books: The Golden String by Bede Griffiths
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Nothing like a midsummer sacrifice
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Nepal’s shifting loyalties — All Roads Lead North: China, Nepal and the Conquest for the Himalayas by Amish Raj Mulmi review
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An unlikely artistic alliance: the wartime Britons who saved and celebrated German art
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Kazakhstan’s Russia problem
notebook
Fratelli d’Italia’s Burning Flame — why the medium is the message for Giorgia Meloni
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EI Weekly Listen — Geopolitics, geoeconomics and Russian revisionism by Mikael Wigell
podcasts
EI Weekly Listen — Elements of seapower, past and present by Lincoln Paine
podcasts
EI Weekly Listen — Russia and geopolitics by Anna-Lena Laurén
podcasts
Worldview — the Eurasian century
podcasts
EI Weekly Listen — Alexander Lee on Machiavelli and civil strife
podcasts
EI Weekly Listen – Tim Marshall: New Turkey’s old politics
podcasts
EI Weekly Listen — Clive Aslet: The changing fate of the English country house
podcasts
EI Weekly Listen – Philip Bobbitt: A government of laws
podcasts
The Eurasian Century, by Hal Brands
page
Meritocracy Week
page
The infinite delight of Italo Calvino
book-review
What is the British Army for?
notebook
Succession: the end of the line
notebook
Championing Opera’s Next Generation
book-review
Cannes: festival of freedom
notebook
The mighty Dnieper’s war stories
notebook
Karabakh is no more
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Stopping the Exodus: an impossible task
notebook
How Bernstein loved the impossible
book-review
How Sweden’s NATO bid became a geopolitical bargaining chip
notebook
Spinoza’s radical enlightenment
book-review
Janáček’s small-town world
book-review
‘We were there with the history makers, really finding out what they thought and felt’ – in conversation with Norma Percy
essays
Keith Murdoch, the patriarch
portraits
Victor Erice’s lost time
book-review
The madness of crowds
notebook
Did Tiberius have a grand strategy?
notebook
To top it with the best of them
book-review
The dark beauty of Alain Delon
notebook
Izabela Czartoryska, Polish princess and patriot
book-review
The illusory search for a lost civilisation
notebook
John Lavery’s lasting impressions
book-review
Alex Salmond, the nearly man who almost broke up Britain
notebook
The curious history of imaginary libraries
notebook
A monarch’s message of unity
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The language of flowers
book-review
The Edwardian assault on free trade
notebook
A little history of privacy
book-review
How to save imperial history
book-review
Start
page
The Ettrick Shepherd stands watch
notebook
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky – Rocket Man
portraits
The Indo-Pacific is an idea whose time has come
notebook
A contested Afghanistan could be even worse
notebook
Weimar on the West Coast
notebook
The beauty of brocade paper
notebook
George IV: a very decadent Prince
essays
George Kennedy Young: Banker, Writer, Soldier, Spy
portraits
China’s neverending pigstory
notebook
Anna Komnene – the princess who chronicled Byzantium’s changing fortunes
portraits
The polymath in the age of specialisation
essays
Nafissa Sid Cara — an ambiguous pioneer for Muslim women
portraits
The great beauty of Donatello
essays
The strange death of the art school
notebook
Who are the modern Greeks?
notebook
Solitude standing
notebook
Genius has its limits
notebook
Milton vs the echo chamber
notebook
Angels among us
notebook
Order and chaos in ancient Indian thought
essays
Will Russia be happy as China’s junior partner?
notebook
Helen Sutherland – brave cultivator of the beautiful
portraits
Bartolus of Saxoferrato — a legal legend between two ages
portraits
The ancient art of sycophancy
notebook
Carl Akeley – the contradictory life of a taxidermist and hunter turned wildlife photographer
portraits
Nature through the eyes of two Victorians: a birdwatcher and his big-game hunting brother
essays
Finding the God in Godard
notebook
Hip to be Square
book-review
Great Books: the Winnetou series by Karl May
book-review
Belarus: the state built by the Second World War
notebook
What are leaders good for?
essays
In defence of freedom in fiction
essays
Seeing through Mussolini’s lies
book-review
Christmas warmth illuminates dark times
essays
Napoleon: the revolutionary who made himself an emperor
book-review
Bengal Opium: a study in continuity
essays
The metamorphosis of Volodymyr Zelensky
notebook
Is farming the root of civilisation?
essays
Antonio Greppi — architect of enlightened absolutism
portraits
What Waco Means Now
notebook
William Gerhardie’s Russian Problem
notebook
NATO’s Baltic Dilemma
notebook
A Little History of Modern Russia
notebook
Religion v Science: Crossing the Great Divide
book-review
The Spying Game Will Find a Use for AI
notebook
The German key to European liberty
essays
In search of Ararat
notebook
Venetian visions of China’s future
book-review
The multiple mysteries of Italian wine
notebook
Taking sport too seriously
notebook
The inexhaustible genius of classical music
notebook
Super superconductors? Don’t believe the hype
notebook
Democracy is no longer a ‘hurray-word’ in West Africa
notebook
The limits of the Roman Empire
book-review
Hegel’s philosophy of history
book-review
The limits of dictatorship
notebook
Polycrisis? What polycrisis?
notebook
Giacomo Puccini: untormented genius
notebook
‘We are in the most sustained period of high crisis since 1962’ — in conversation with Philip Zelikow
notebook
Auden’s Austrian summer
book-review
Did slavery cause the British Industrial Revolution?
book-review
Fake Shakespeare
notebook
7 October has not changed the Middle East
notebook
Inside Mozambique’s war on terror
book-review
The unmaking of Julius Caesar
book-review
The Pythagoras myth
notebook
Iran and Pakistan’s shared crisis in Baluchistan
notebook
Stravinsky’s forever modern masterpiece
book-review
Friedman fighter
book-review
All hail the mandarin collar
notebook
The many meanings of the age of upheaval
essays
Sweden’s long and winding road to NATO
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Russia’s long imperial moment
notebook
The salvation of Spinoza
essays
China and Russia: forever brothers?
essays
Henry Stubbe, early modern champion of ‘Mahometan Christianity’
portraits
How East Germany lost the battle for technology
essays
The rise of the great power carve up
essays
Iran’s sudden power vacuum
notebook
NATO’s next act
book-review
Charles Dickens’ creature comforts
book-review
Japan’s genius for crafts
book-review
The spires at the heart of French history
notebook
Putin’s Napoleon complex
notebook
The medieval roots of modern antisemitism
book-review
The Islamist rivalry reshaping Turkish politics
notebook
The struggle for Saudi Arabia’s buried past
essays
Mint condition
book-review
How censorship conquered the world, again
essays
Resurrecting Mahler
book-review
Everything short of war: Hizbollah’s strategy lies in ruins
notebook
The unforgettable Michael Gambon
notebook
Arnold Schönberg and the artist’s right to be awkward
notebook
Music like you’ve never heard it before
book-review
How the US origin myth triumphed over history
essays
Liberté and Laïcité
notebook
Trump and Iran face off across a new Middle East
notebook
Liberalism’s lost saint
book-review
Ghospelling and ghossiping
book-review
The 1840 Oriental Crisis, a triumph of diplomacy
notebook
Russia’s long war with the maritime powers
essays
The spectacular disasters of Augustus the Strong
book-review
The hunchback of Mosul
notebook
Music at the end of time
book-review
Israel’s elusive peace
notebook
The making of Oscar Wilde
book-review
Securonomics belongs to the world of yesterday
notebook
The wages of a nuclear war
book-review
Virginia Cowles, a woman in search of trouble
portraits
The ballad of John and Paul
book-review
How the Young Turks became tyrants
notebook
Trump’s tariff paradox
notebook
The political power of knowing your enemy
notebook
Trump’s Syrian deal like no other
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Poetry for the common reader
book-review
Crowded out
notebook
That was once upon a time in Iraq
notebook
Great Books: E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops
book-review
The perils of the quest for immortality
notebook
Sophie Scholl — still the White Rose blooms
notebook
Her Great Quality
notebook
Jaan Kross — a writer’s route to happiness
portraits
More than the sum of our parts
notebook
Did America lose the right stuff?
notebook
Infernal allies
essays
The tragedy of the Trump circus
notebook
Element of the absurd — In Search of Romania by Dennis Deletant review
book-review
Worldview — Leadership in war
podcasts
What was it like being Rome’s richest man?
book-review
Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto-gold turned to dust
notebook
Great Books: Colette’s The Pure and the Impure
book-review
How early EVs were overtaken by macho petrol heads
notebook
Great Books: Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk
book-review
The Gospel according to King Charles
notebook
Victor Frankenstein’s bad habits
notebook
The deep historical roots of Russia’s scorched earth policy
essays
Machiavelli’s take on mercenaries
notebook
Sex and death in mid-nineteenth century America
book-review
What Richard Wagner can tell us about the Wagner Group
notebook
John Paul II understood geopolitics
notebook
A Chinese history to start a fire
book-review
The haunting presence of Stanley Kubrick
notebook
The British Empire’s Indian odyssey
essays
Hollywood’s most gifted scribe
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On Hilary Mantel and not meeting famous authors
notebook
How to reform the House of Lords without really trying
notebook
Why on earth do actors become novelists?
notebook
Diplomacy, betrayal and the road to Vietnam
book-review
On the frontline in Lebanon
notebook
The Mughals, opulence unparalleled
book-review
The perils of predicting the future
notebook
Donald Trump’s cryptopia
notebook
The heroes of Notre-Dame’s resurrection
notebook
Rahab, the Old Testament’s female super spy
portraits
A great power carve up
notebook
Mining for meaning
book-review
The quest for the age of the earth
essays
What the West can learn from Cold War dissidents
notebook
The Second World War had its poets too
book-review
Why utopias still matter
notebook
Finding the future in France Profonde
notebook
Donnez moi un break
notebook
The quest for Vino and Veritas
notebook
Casting a vote for democracy
notebook
Bad history — why the Treaty of Versailles is an imperfect guide to future Russia-West relations
notebook
Working From Anywhere — the holiday never stops
notebook
In search of civilisation
essays
The ancient roots of the modern holy war
essays
Italia 1990s: footballing glory turned to dust
notebook
It came from outer space
essays
Guittone d’Arezzo – Dante’s forgotten muse
portraits
Knowing Russia was going to invade Ukraine was not enough
notebook
Why 16 billion cortical neurons are not enough
essays
Epicharis — defiance unbounded
portraits
Football’s most perfect meritocracy
notebook
Russia and the West – the path not taken
essays
The different ways to know the gods in Ancient Greece
essays
Does evolution have a moral or spiritual dimension?
essays
Roman geopolitics — an exercise in myth-making
essays
The transformation of Mitteleuropa
essays
Grey matters
notebook
The lost allure of alchemy
notebook
On the art of metallurgy
notebook
Policy shaped by personal conviction — False Prophets: British leaders’ fateful fascination with the Middle East from Suez to Syria by Nigel Ashton review
book-review
The joy of books
book-review
Priaulx Rainier: Fearless and pioneering composer
portraits
The shadow of 1912: history points to a GOP split
notebook
Missing the boat in a broad canvas — Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern by Mary Beard review
book-review
Ancient scandals and power struggles: Succession’s unexpected playfulness with ancient history
notebook
Suffering — the price of being alive: an Islamic perspective
essays
Dispatched to Donbas to honour frontline heroes
notebook
A collision of rival visions — Empire and Jihad: The Anglo-Arab Wars of 1870-1920 by Neil Faulkner review
book-review
Where Cambridge leads Britain should follow
notebook
The promise of Greenland
notebook
Waugh’s war
notebook
Maria Antonia of Bavaria — Electress of many talents
portraits
On betrayal
essays
Pittacus – the good tyrant
portraits
The merrie histories of R.J. Unstead
notebook
Fighting the good fight
notebook
Edward Daniel Clarke – collector of the world
portraits
The ghost of Olof Palme: how support for the Kurds is complicating Sweden’s NATO accession
notebook
Moina Mathers — High Priestess of the Belle Époque
portraits
How to speak when speech isn’t free
notebook
Apology for a woman writing
notebook
This woman’s work
notebook
Dunwich’s very English apocalypse
notebook
The original women in STEM
notebook
Mimi Baez Fariña – life beyond the 60s
portraits
The many meanings of Georgia O’Keeffe
notebook
EI Weekly Listen — Fairy Tales of Statehood: the politics of sacred land and divine-kings by Jessica Frazier
podcasts
Hans Rott — a symphonic stepping stone
portraits
Essaying a genre
notebook
The Eurasian Century, Part II: The Great Black Tornado
essays
Star Wars — the mythos of our times
notebook
Nijinsky’s last dance
notebook
Great Books: Charles Dickens’ Hard Times
book-review
Is energy the god of progress?
notebook
Putin’s war with the Church
notebook
Jacobus Clemens non Papa – absolutely not the Pope
portraits
More than a bandstand
notebook
Fear and loathing in East Anglia
notebook
The possibility of elsewhere
notebook
Missing the theatre of everyday life
notebook
In praise of Rembrandt’s ruffs
notebook
The rise of the metaverse
notebook
Football’s rhetoric of suffering
notebook
The 1920 Battle for Ukraine — a warning from the past
notebook
A hook to uncover hidden histories — My Grandfather’s Knife: And Other Stories of War and Belongings by Joseph Pearson review
book-review
Frederic Prokosch — freedom in fiction
portraits
China’s ruling creed at 100: the Party never stops
essays
The silence of Chinese intellectuals under Xi Jinping
notebook
Women in modern China — the odds are heaped against Peng Shuai
notebook
Margaret of Austria, Duchess of Savoy – true to her own self
essays
Gareth Evans — philosophy’s lost prodigy
portraits
A marriage of the geopolitical, the military and the material — Victory at Sea: Naval Power and the Transformation of the Global Order in World War II by Paul Kennedy review
book-review
In praise of music’s uselessness
notebook
Patrick Hamilton’s reversals of fortune
book-review
Bohumil Hrabal — king of palaverers
portraits
Kerouac Abroad, Kerouac at Sea and Kerouac Out There
notebook
Mikhail Gorbachev gave Russia a chance
essays
Madame de Pompadour — eighteenth-century fashion and twenty-first-century fads
book-review
The Pacific Century is here — but not as advertised
notebook
Stalin, Mao and turbulent transitions in authoritarian regimes
book-review
How the information age really began
essays
Gorbachev did not end the Cold War alone — the West won
notebook
Have Britons lost the art of talking proper?
notebook
Great Books: The Sorrows of Satan by Marie Corelli
book-review
Democratised and declassified: the era of social media war is here
notebook
Superforecasting will not save us
essays
A very medieval cost of living crisis
notebook
The imbalance of terror: reflections on nuclear deterrence from the 1980s
notebook
When the fighting stops, what then?
notebook
Winston Churchill, arch-pragmatist
essays
Sharing Everest a tall order
notebook
Hiring – new opportunities at Engelsberg Ideas
notebook
Where does Cuba’s destiny lie?
book-review
Kon Satoshi — animator of unmatched talent
portraits
Who created The Paintings for the Temple?
essays
Capitalism’s Dutch dynamic
book-review
José Saramago was the master of reinvention
notebook
Great Books: Virginia Woolf’s Flush: A Biography
book-review
NATO is back
notebook
Pulling at the threads of astrology
notebook
Great Books: Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie
book-review
Liberty and the myth of Venice
essays
Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca – conquistador brawler turned defender of Indigenous American Rights
portraits
US aiding Ukraine won’t deter China
essays
Great Books: Alistair Horne’s The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916
book-review
The West’s Lust for Liberty
essays
Spring’s Norman Roots
notebook
Sparta’s Self-inflicted Wound
notebook
Estonia’s Musical Miracles
notebook
Liberty in the Shadow of Bonaparte
essays
Highs and lows
book-review
Noel Coward’s too brief encounter with the silver screen
notebook
The many paradoxes of Bernard Mandeville
book-review
Marching on Rome
notebook
The Ancients loved dogs too
notebook
In search of William Byrd’s lighter side
notebook
Milan Kundera dreamt in Czech
notebook
Ukraine’s long game
notebook
You can call me Al
notebook
Strawberry buns at The End of the World Café: thoughts on the Polish-Russian border
notebook
Beyond Berlin
notebook
The invention of the average
book-review
The first prime minister
notebook
Ransacking Naples
book-review
The many worlds of Margaret Cavendish
book-review
Finding Turkey in Narnia
essays
An earthy, austere Ring
book-review
The boundless creativity of Wayne Shorter
book-review
A day to remember
book-review
The sorrow and pity of war
notebook
Gaza’s troubles began long ago
notebook
Hamas’ genocidal massacre on October 7 has deep historical roots
notebook
Israel’s Fauda fallacy
notebook
Iranians know who their enemy is, and it’s not Israel
notebook
Celebrating Ligeti’s soundspace odyssey
book-review
Celebrating Anpanman at fifty
notebook
The many meanings of Jihad
notebook
The Messianic roots of the modern settler movement
notebook
Powell and Pressburger worked miracles
book-review
Ferdinand’s second life was the sweetest
notebook
Is Falstaff too large a character to bring to life?
notebook
The broken lawnmower: Noël Coward’s greatest line?
notebook
Krampus lives
notebook
Fay Schopen, 1975-2023
notebook
Gaza and the long tail of terror
notebook
Medieval wanderlust
book-review
The dialects of Joseph Wright
portraits
Going it alone
notebook
Navalny’s end
notebook
The most dangerous of short stories
notebook
Nixon’s dance with the chairman
notebook
Worldview — Ukraine, two years on
podcasts
Sargent’s brush with fashion
book-review
Curt Bloch’s underwater resistance
book-review
Russia and the West: a dialogue of the deaf
notebook
Kind of Blue’s quiet mystery
book-review
An Easter elegy
notebook
The forgotten art of memory
notebook
A wild Winterreise
book-review
A dynasty of human frailty
book-review
Michael Tanner, the complete critic
notebook
Rethinking Impressionism
book-review
Isabella Whitney, England’s first female professional writer
portraits
The secret to Byzantium’s success
book-review
The bells, the bells
notebook
The Warsaw Pact’s forgotten legacy
notebook
Venice, the serenely unclassifiable city
book-review
James Salter, last of the Americans
book-review
James Ensor, the man behind the masks
notebook
Nietzsche’s Italian connection
book-review
Eric Rohmer’s timeless antidotes
notebook
Queen Isabella, the ‘she-wolf of France’
portraits
Abraham Lincoln’s warning against mob rule
notebook
Russia returns to Svalbard
notebook
Poetry, prose and the battle for Paradise Lost
essays
Two assassinations and a region on the brink
notebook
Hydro-imperialism
book-review
The hidden fractures beneath America’s Cold War triumph
book-review
The muddles and mysteries of A Passage to India
notebook
Americana noir
essays
How Arthur Ashe rewrote the script
notebook
What makes a good opening line?
notebook
The invention of music
book-review
A little history of the anchovy
book-review
Ancient India’s global reach
book-review
Old tech makes new problems for Hizbollah
notebook
Glasgow’s theatre of enchantment and heartbreak
book-review
The revelation of Joachim du Bellay
notebook
Why human creativity matters in the age of AI
essays
Dr Strangelove’s comedy of nightmares
essays
The many makings of Donald Trump
book-review
Xi and his presidents
notebook
Five obstacles to Trump’s peace plan
notebook
Nasser’s children
book-review
The magic of Tirzah Garwood
book-review
An echo of South Korea’s past
notebook
The rift that doomed the Confederacy
essays
Uplifting India
book-review
The long struggle for Syria
notebook
The pardon paradox
notebook
Russia’s Cold War Redux strategy for the Middle East lies in ruins
notebook
A deep history of games
book-review
Literacy’s declining empire
notebook
Podcasts v the written word
notebook
Maria Callas made her own myths
book-review
The lost art of chorography
essays
Trump in the shadow of Reagan
notebook
Why Indonesia joined the BRICS
notebook
Geopolitics, the Scandinavian way
notebook
The deep history behind America’s Greenland gambit
essays
Russia cannot conquer Ukraine
notebook
The betrayal of Ukraine
notebook
Nothing is worse than an inconclusive peace
notebook
Partygoing at the opera
book-review
The art of Éric Rohmer
notebook
My journey to a defiant Ukraine
notebook
Bringing back the stately quadrille
notebook
The pen that became a symbol of France
notebook
The power of pilgrimage
book-review
An empire of ivory and inhumanity
book-review
Henry Fuseli knew about nightmares
book-review
How a Republic falls
book-review
Is this free speech?
book-review
Shostakovich spoke truth to power
notebook
A leisurely guide to a spiritual life
notebook
The art of the hedgerow
notebook
The historical power of Jan Matejko’s painting
notebook
Kashmir’s forgotten war goes global
essays
Countryside writing’s rebirth
book-review
The times and tides of the wild River Thames
book-review
Ukraine’s deep strike
notebook
England’s time of troubles
book-review
Lillie Langtry and the business of beauty
portraits
The Islamic Republic on the ropes
notebook
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