A friend emailed Tuesday morning from New York: “In tears already and it hasn’t begun.” Another wrote me that her husband, horrified by reports of crowds in Washington, was “afraid there will be a stampede or something awful”.
Which summed it up, really: the levels of emotion built up in advance of the 2009 presidential inauguration ceremony were so high that some wept, some fainted, and some were paralysed by fear. Read on »

The maps on the television screens started turning blue as soon as the polls had closed on the East Coast; by midnight, John McCain had conceded the presidency to Barack Obama. But I had known the election result many hours before. Read on »

‘It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” In recent days, this famous Churchillian pronouncement on Russia has echoed through many an analysis. In particular, Vladimir Putin - former Russian president, current Russian prime minister, the man still clearly in charge of the country - has been held up as a great puzzle. Read on »

And now, at last, we’ve got to the interesting part: the race between two candidates seemingly so different from one another that their opposing presidential campaigns can actually be described in large, sweeping metaphors. Read on »

Are you tired of the US election campaign? Not really sure what they’re arguing about any more? Read on »

Forty years after the murder of Martin Luther King, the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama has once again led America to search its soul. Read on »

On the day when Barack Obama first entered America’s consciousness I was sitting glumly in the audience. It was the summer of 2004, at the Democratic Convention in Boston. Read on »

Where have all the plumbers gone? Read on »

Last week, I found myself in Dom Knigi, the very largest of all the very large Moscow bookstores, staring at the history section. Read on »

Dissidents against the authoritarian regime, many of them in London, are raising the stakes. The President’s response is to get even tougher — and to target Britain in his new propaganda war. Read on »