The author of Secret Affairs says that the past is returning ‘to haunt British policy in Afghanistan’ Mark Curtis; Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion With Radical Islam (2020) Richard Norton-Taylor British collusion with radical Islamist forces, including extremists who provided training camps for the leader of the 7/7 London suicide bombers and who are fomenting the… Read More UK’s collusion with Islamists ‘catastrophic’ (2010)
Sumit Sarkar, one of India’s most reputed historians of modern times, talks of breaking the mould NB: Sumit Sarkar was a stalwart of historical scholarship and a great teacher. Hundreds of students have sat in his classes and learned at his feet. I am grateful to have been one of them, in my MA days… Read More Sumit Sarkar (1939-2026): A historian muses on forty years of scholarship
The life of the hugely influential ‘people’s historian’ is explored in a wide-ranging new book that brings in everything from wars to civil rights to Matt Damon When times got tough for Zinn: “… he was able to live through these times when he was also able to lecture in the classroom, about all sorts… Read More The incredible life of historian Howard Zinn (1922-2010)
In the words of the Swedish Academy, he “uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms.” The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti,… Read More Harold Pinter: Nobel Prize lecture; 2005
NB: The tangled web of communal politics in South Asia as a whole is exemplified by the circumstances in which Nasrin was hounded out of her own country for defending the human rights of minorities; and thereafter from India, for her critical remarks about religious extremism. Criticism of religion as well as of communal versions… Read More Taslima Nasrin returns to Kolkata after two decades
Taiwanese people look on with concern at fate of Hong Kong’s independent booksellers, after series of arrests in recent months Amy Hawkins and Yu-chen Li in Taipei Walking out of one of Hong Kong’s last remaining independent bookstores, hands behind her back but head held high, the woman’s T-shirt was emblazoned with a simple slogan: “I am a bookstore… Read More ‘A statement of freedom’: T-shirt slogan goes viral and book sales rocket in Taiwan after Hong Kong raids
The World at First Light: A New History of the RenaissanceBernd Roeck Tom Verde Historians typically trace the birth of the Renaissance to fourteenth-century Florence. Then, after three centuries, that brilliant era of artistry eventually gave way to the Reformation, with its shift away from humanism, and the Enlightenment, which picked up (and ran) where… Read More Why the West?
The cultural fascination with the middle ages rarely acknowledges that power is still won and abused in the same wayIt makes a mockery of the idea that we use “medieval” as a term of abuse to fling at others, when really it’s a term that correctly defines enduring and deeply shameful characteristics of our own… Read More Our tendency to persecute others is as alive today as in medieval times
Adam Tooze April 17, 2026 In March in Beijing I had the privilege of meeting and talking with Professor Wang Hui of Tsinghua. This edited transcript is published in cooperation with Equator Magazine (many thanks to the editorial team there) with an introduction by my friend Kaiser Kuo. Introduction by Kaiser Kuo To sit in Beijing in… Read More The Two-Faced Present – A conversation about the “short twentieth century” – and the paradoxical twenty-first with Wang Hui
Imagine then, for a moment, not the darkness of the cinema so much as the darkness of the king and queen’s pillared hall, where guests are gathered for feasting and for telling stories. Against the flickering fire, the bard strikes up with his harp and starts to sing, performing tales of adventure and loss, return… Read More ‘More postmodern than ancient’: why the Odyssey is everywhere, from Oz to Westeros
After the truth-shower 