‘Japan is not interesting’: thus the literary scholar Masao Miyoshi could, with a twist of irony, entitle an essay on his native country a decade and a half ago. The dramas that have since beset Japan ...

There is a paradox in the idea of transformation. If a transformation is deep-seated enough, it might also transform the very criteria by which we could identify it, thus making it unintelligible to ...

– In 1846, the target was continental expansion, not clear how far downwards and upwards, but essentially contiguous ...

Moreover, he has already breached the historic firewall around the far right by using the AfD’s parliamentary backing to pass ...

The situation recalled Tom Nairn’s verdict on the Labour administration of Harold Wilson in 1965, which he said had not just ...

In 1945 France ruled a vast colonial empire, second only in size—and in brutality—to the British. But whereas Britain disposed of its empire without any serious repercussions for domestic politics, ...

The explosion of the 2008 financial crisis has produced a series of unforeseen political consequences, in Europe in particular. How can the forces of the radical left best respond to this ...

The Kurdish forces, then, appear to believe that swallowing this bitter pill is the only way to preserve their social base ...

The subtitle of Jaron Lanier’s previous book, You Are Not a Gadget, declared it a manifesto. His latest book, Who Owns the Future?, is something of a utopia. But like More’s original, its projections ...

There is a discursive strategy commonly adopted by politicians, particularly at election time, in the face of discomforting questions. It consists of appearing to respond to a questioner but without ...

'Nowadays, national literature doesn’t mean much: the age of world literature is beginning, and everybody should contribute to hasten its advent.’ This was Goethe, of course, talking to Eckermann in ...

Second driving idea of Eurocommunism. Again in opposition to the theses of classical Marxism, it is argued that socialist democracy does not imply a radically new institutional system, qualitatively ...