The Cold War may be over, as George W Bush has been telling all and sundry since he arrived in Europe last week, but the imperial presidency lives on. Continue reading “How I met POTUS – and his 600-man road show”
Soviet-style terror has the media at bay
President Putin’s tightening grip looks likely to crush his country’s last privately owned TV station.
By any standards NTV, the only remaining privately owned television station in Russia, is in a peculiar position. Its chief shareholder, Vladimir Gusinsky, has fled the country, having been arrested once already. Continue reading “Soviet-style terror has the media at bay”
The polish Model
When President Bush landed here yesterday, he found himself in a completely different city from the one his father visited as president in 1989. Back then, Warsaw was still run by communist bureaucrats. Continue reading “The polish Model”
I am still normal
Four years ago, I saw a great deal of Tony Blair. At that time, I was a political columnist for a British newspaper, and he was the Leader of the Opposition. As a result I saw him in public, in private, in the House of Commons, in newspaper offices; I saw him shaking hands, kissing babies, making speeches, chatting to admirers. Continue reading “I am still normal”
The battle for the Holocaust legacy
In the travelling over the past fifteen years or so, I reckon I have visited several dozen memorials to Hitler’s destruction of the Jews. I have been to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem; to the Polish museums and memorials commemorating Auschwitz, Treblinka, and the Warsaw ghetto; to uncounted monuments and plaques, wrecked synagogues and wrecked Jewish cemeteries in other parts of Eastern Europe, Germany and the former Soviet Union, all testifying to the terrifying absence of a nation which once was a major part of European culture. Continue reading “The battle for the Holocaust legacy”
Spurning Bush
As I write this, thousands of ardent young people are boarding trains and buses, heading towards Spain, towards Sweden, towards just about every place that President George W. Bush might possibly appear in public on his first state visit to Europe. Continue reading “Spurning Bush”
Secret agent man
Over the past few days and weeks, much has been made of the “mystery” of Vladimir Putin, the man who now runs Russia. Yet in some ways, we know far more about him than we ever knew about the very private Boris Yeltsin. Continue reading “Secret agent man”
Ethnic Cleansing, Russian Style
The Chechen wars of the 1990s were not the first time Moscow targeted the Chechens. First there were ‘sneaky Orientals’. Then there were “miserly Jews”. Now, thanks to the power of the international media to transmit ideas across borders, another ethnic stereotype has entered the English language. Continue reading “Ethnic Cleansing, Russian Style”
Playing at Survival in Warsaw
An interview with Wladyslaw Szpilman, musician, writer, and survivor.
He lives in a neat, narrow house with a small, well-kept garden. Inside his sitting room there are shelves of old books, a Biedermeier secretaire, a polished parquet floor. Black and white photographs of old friends stand in rows on the piano; prints and framed mementoes hang from the white walls. At first glance, everything about Wladyslaw Szpilman speaks of a certain kind of Central European comfort, of a pleasantly uneventful, bourgeois life. Continue reading “Playing at Survival in Warsaw”
I Was Booked on Flight 103
A meditation on Lockerbie, accidents, and fear of flying.
I cannot remember a time when I did not fly on airplanes, and for years and years, I flew without anxiety. Later, after the Lockerbie crash, when I developed serious fear of flying not the odd tremor during turbulence, but the real thing – this previous experience with airplanes helped me to keep it concealed. Continue reading “I Was Booked on Flight 103”