Let’s keep out of war in Syria. The BBC 5 o’clock news started with the most extraordinary and chilling words I have heard in fifty years of watching or listening to the BBC News. “Russia and America edge closer to war over Syria.” Previously the most chilling words I had heard ...

This past Tuesday several people were murdered just outside the House of Commons. Killing people outside security barriers makes much better sense for a terrorist than trying to pass them, though the murderer did that too in the end, before being shot dead. Tim Stanley, the British journalist and ...

A few days ago, I met a mordant Palestinian-American who told me why he refuses to recognize the existence of Israel. He said that in 1948 his father, as a boy of 6, was tied to a tree by Jewish soldiers and forced to witness the murder of several uncles and cousins. His father was spared because ...

I hope the Cologne mass sexual assaults will be of lasting and huge significance to European history, and I even think they might. (Recently arrived Arab migrants sexually assaulted large numbers of German women in front of the Cologne Cathedral on New Year's Eve, in case you have been in a ...

My Syrian Christian friends"€”refugees themselves in Bucharest, though affluent refugees"€”are strongly opposed to admitting Muslim asylum seekers into Europe. They have reasons. Quite by chance, one just called me, on business. He is an intelligent man of good family. (Christians make up ...

Rains finally came. The dog days came to a pause for two days, but Bucharest was still hot. We drove to Tulcea"€”the quiet of a small town in a poor province on a summer afternoon"€”and took the speedboat to Chilia, which gives its name to one of the three branches of the Danube Delta. The ...

All countries are traditions based on religion and genetics, though in irreligious countries they don’t know it. And all European countries these days seem to be in very big trouble. The Republic of Ireland, where until the 1990s divorce was illegal, is about to vote on whether to institute ...

A woman friend once told me that the secret of being a bitch is to tell the truth in the nastiest possible way. In Fleet Street a succession of women journalists have been paid to be complete bitches, because male and especially female readers enjoy it. It’s probably a mildly sado-masochistic ...