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How those within the Brussels Beltway in the EU institutions must pine for the simple days of the past. Not only was the European project in itself fa…
From London to Rome, Paris to Stockholm, there is no other contemporary issue that can move the general public's political needle quite so quickly as …
Some say it should be a loose collection of sovereign nation states; others say it should aspire to be a kind of super-nation state itself. Or is it, …
July 2011 saw that rarest of events - an attempt to resolve a conflict in Africa by the redrawing of borders. It saw the birth of South Sudan as a ful…
At the end of the 20th century, it looked like history was being made. After a century that had seen Europe dissolve into an orgy of bloody conflict n…
Anybody who has been following the news in recent months knows that bloodshed has returned to South Africa. The recent violence and deaths among strik…
The liberal media in the Western World takes a firm line on how two of the big issues facing Africa intersect - bluntly speaking Africa's high levels …
Not long ago I had a discussion (prompted, I think, by a poll in The Economist) with my colleague about which city on earth could boast that it was th…
Every so often a book lands on my desk about something so obviously interesting that I have never really considered it before. Bruce Whitehouse's Migr…
One of the hardest jobs in journalism is making sense of conflict. Seeing through the fog of war and through what each side wants you to report is fan…
Three years ago I travelled overland with my wife from Victoria Falls through Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique and Tanzania. It felt like we were on a real …
One chilling statistic relating to 1945 is that more German soldiers died in that January than in any other month of the war: 450,000. It was not just…
Several months ago I interviewed Steve Bloomfield, the author of a book on African football, for New Books in African studies. As usual, I ended the i…
When was the last time you ate some chocolate? If you live in the developed world there's a strong chance that you've been munching on some fairly rec…
Much of the literature on modern Africa makes the unhappy comparison between hopes, especially upon independence, and reality. In Zimbabwe that link r…
Few people are in a better position to assess different countries and cultures than those caught between them. So it is with Philip Oltermann: a Germa…
Coming to terms with the limitations of our own sporting achievement is one of the hardest things many of us have to do in life. A couple of years ago…
My grandfather joined up when the Second World War broke out, but he was soon returned to civvy street as he was much more valuable employing his mech…
I have always found something distinctly 'un-British' about the Mediterranean. I grew up thinking of the British empire - and British spirit - as bein…
When I was fourteen I was faced with a difficult choice. I was dreadful at languages but knew that I had another two years of brain-aching pain ahead …
A couple of weeks ago I took a bus from Warsaw and travelled east across the River Bug. The border took a long time to cross, but then this was no ord…
The hardest part of living in a foreign land is crossing that invisible divide between being an outsider and getting to know a country properly. An ol…
Few places can match the Djemaa el Fna in Marrakech for spectacle. As the shadows lengthen and dusk approaches, the square seethes with snake charmers…
A couple of days ago I had an unusual experience. I was staying in a hotel in Kampala, with a stunning view of the southern reaches of the Ugandan cap…