Losing your state once may be reckoned misfortune but losing it twice begins to look like carelessness. Reunited in 1990, the Fatherland became a nation for the third time and has since acted with more caution, realism and perhaps wisdom than everyone in Europe and America has always liked.

Fading interest in Europe—for Putin, the G7 is so yesterday—marks a return of that ineffable sense of Russian superiority, equalled in history only in England by the English, and partly against the run of play, in France by the French. But superiority complexes belie inferiority complexes, as Russian literary careers sometimes show

Of course not, says Jean-Marie Bouissou in Les Leçons du […]

Overall, the new Indian writers show dreamers infected by the defining Western malady, a kind of anomie based on the unending search for individual and material gratification. Can East and West ever meet? On the evidence, they have long done so and give no sign of stopping any time soon

According to Julia Shaw, who lectures in the jurisprudence of brain science and psychology, 'memories' are created and re-created in an infinite chain, with each re-creation subtly or radically altering what the mind retains. It gets worse. The brain then 'remembers' the re-creation, not the original

For seventy years now, a biblical lifetime, varieties of democratic […]

During angry street marches in Barcelona, one man raged against […]

Rousseau, theatre critic, was against politics in drama. Like Plato […]

Lulled by the charms of rational nationalism, which include the growth and global spread of prosperity, the progressive mind fails to spot its twin in the shadows, irrational nationalism. The besetting sin is ignorance of the dark side, a weakness that catches liberals asleep at the wheel every time.