If one were searching for an appropriate metaphor — and, on days like this, one is always searching for a metaphor — it would be hard to do better than US Airways Flight 1549 and its safe crash-landing in the Hudson River last week. This extraordinary event was, if you like, the anti-Sept. 11: A …
Before sitting down with this hefty doorstopper of a diary, first ask yourself whether you agree — or can imagine yourself agreeing — with the entry Arthur Schlesinger, Jr made on 27 March 1950: ‘I adore sitting around hotel rooms with politicians and newspapermen exchanging gossip over drinks.’
Like every continent, Europe has its rituals. In the spring, the storks return to the Low Countries from their winter nests in Africa. In the autumn, the French return to Paris from their beaches in the south. And in the winter, the Russians threaten to cut off the natural gas supplies to Ukraine.
Circumstances change; so do the names of the leading players. Peace negotiators come and go; so do the details of their agreements. But in the end, one aspect of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains the same: When all else has failed, you can be absolutely certain that someone, somewhere, will issue a statement calling for peace.
On Christmas morning, my husband found a CD of “The Greatest Speeches of All Time” in his stocking. It was, if I may say so, an inspired gift.
Fires burned in courtyards, shops were looted and Molotov cocktails whistled through clouds of tear gas. Hundreds of schools and campuses were occupied by students and, for more than two weeks, riots brought a major European capital to a halt. The police seemed powerless, the politicians helpless, the media confused.
Not long ago, a European professor who often lectures in the US reminisced to me about how American students have changed. when he visited Harvard and Yale in the 1960s, he told me, the students were all alike: white, male, East Coast. By the 1980s, however, they included blacks, Asians and women. Even the white …
Barack Obama Taps into the Ivy League For His Cabinet Read More »
Scene One: We are buying an apartment in Warsaw, sometime in the early 1990s. At every stage of the transaction, my husband and I have to turn up in person, stand in line, present identity cards. We appear at the notary’s office, more than once. We appear at the tax office, more than once. Finally, …
Jonathan Brent arrived in Moscow, in the winter of 1992, bearing gifts: salami, biscuits, chocolates in the shape of the Statue of Liberty, bottles of Jack Daniels, stacks of $1 bills, cartons of Winston cigarettes.
As I write, the world’s security experts still have no idea which organization carried out this week’s terrorist attacks in Mumbai, and I have no idea myself.
