Donald Trump is half Scottish. His mother's family had a croft"a smallholding"on the Isle of Lewis in the Hebrides, and he is proud of his Scottish roots. So when, ten years ago, he announced his intention of building "the world's best golf course in Scotland," he spoke of this ...
I"m not the first to remark that the failed "coup" in Turkey is as useful to President Erdogan as the Reichstag fire was to Hitler, but it is worth looking at the two events in more detail, for the comparison between them is striking. Erdogan has, of course, been in power for years and ...
Turkey matters, for obvious reasons: its size (population: 80 million); its geographical position; its influence in the Middle East; its membership in NATO and the fact that it has the second-largest army in the alliance, while some 60 American hydrogen bombs are stored in Turkey (safely, one ...
"Failing's not terrible," said Andy Murray after winning his second Wimbledon final. "It's okay provided you"ve given your best. You have to not be afraid of failing, learn from the losses." He has earned the right to say so, for he has had much experience of failure, ...
The long-delayed, long-awaited Chilcot report into the Iraq War will be available by the time this article appears. A thorough reading of it will take several days, and a period of reflection will be necessary before anyone can sensibly pronounce on its findings and conclusions. Nevertheless, ...
"The whole worl" is in a state o" chassis," says a character in a Sean O"Casey play. By "chassis" he meant "chaos," but "chassis," though a malapropism, is more expressive, and seems right. This is one response to Brexit. It's creating "chassis," ...
How do you feel about Muslims? Not good, eh? They"re different from you and me. They"re hostile, right? The enemy within? Scary. Thinking about Islam, I think also about Kipling. He is one of these writers you don"t come to the end of. He can always surprise, sometime disconcert you. ...
The polls this morning (June 14) indicate that Brexit will win, and the United Kingdom will be on course to leave the E.U. It's depressing. The shrill intolerance and xenophobia of the Little Englanders have no appeal for me and I regard their leaders like Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage with a ...
Most of us can agree that Karl Marx got it wrong. It wasn"t only that the Revolution didn"t come in the advanced industrial and capitalist countries as he expected but in backward Tsarist Russia, which, despite rapid economic growth in the years before 1914, remained essentially an agrarian ...
When I was a small boy I could name all of boxing's world champions, and I guess that anyone who followed the sport could do likewise. This was back in the immediate postwar years, and even people with little interest in what sportswriters still called "the fistic art" knew that Joe Louis ...
