Notebooks

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What Israel does next — in conversation with Dennis Ross

EI's Angus Reilly talks to Dennis Ross, former Middle East Envoy for the Clinton administration and Special Assistant to President Obama, about Hamas' attack on Israel, the impact ..

Angus Reilly October 10, 2023

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John Paul II understood geopolitics

Karol Wojtyła became Poland’s first pontiff forty-five years ago. His successful opposition to authoritarian regimes was born of his uniquely European experiences, in contrast to t..

Elisabeth Braw October 9, 2023

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Hamas takes the nihilistic path of Islamist terror

Hamas has wrapped itself in the black flag of Islamism, not the secular flag of Palestinian statehood. As a result, only the most radical, excluded states will support the terroris..

John Raine October 9, 2023

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The sorrow and pity of war

Greek historians, such as Thucydides, sought to be objective in their accounts of brutal conflict, but occasionally the mask would slip, so appalled were they by the events they re..

Armand D'Angour October 8, 2023

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How Israel lost sight of its enemies

Despite building institutionalised dissent into its intelligence systems, the country was still caught out by terrorists.

Suzanne Raine October 8, 2023

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Irrational Rationalists: Pythagoras matters

The Ancient Greeks are often held up as models of reason, but they combined rationality with the mystical and the magical, often to creative ends.

James Darnton October 5, 2023

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Karabakh is no more

After thirty-five years of trying to break away from Azerbaijan, the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh have been forced into a definitive surrender, ending the last remnant of an Armen..

Jacob Judah October 3, 2023

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Death of a Sycamore

The story of the human being who destroys his environment and himself through greed and wantonness is a fable for our times, as the Greeks and Romans knew.

Armand D'Angour September 29, 2023

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Cort case shows why historical truth matters

The pressure on historians, particularly young ones, to produce work that conforms to a particular worldview, threatens the integrity of the discipline, as a recent controversy dem..

David Wootton September 28, 2023