Footnote The broadcaster, Rajni Kaul, who died this week, aged 93, was married for 63 years to Mahendra Kaul, who was once the face of Asian TV programming on the BBC. Rajni used to joke that her hus...

In early 1979, the US-backed Pahlavi regime was overthrown in Iran, bringing Ayatollah Khomeini to power. In November '79, Americans in the US embassy in Tehran were taken hostage; a month later, ...

Narendra Modi’s supporters should be aware that the Indian prime minister’s reputation is being eroded by seemingly casual references in the Western media. Take, for example, Pick of ...

But to imagine that a novel dealing with lives that are often solitary, inevitably poor, frequently nasty, intermittently brutish, and all-too-often short, is bound to make for grim reading will be to...

Is there such a thing as national character? Does national character explain how our neighbours behave? Biographies of Margaret Thatcher describe her distinctly mixed feelings as news came in of the f...

Stormy petrels seldom have a cache beyond a point. They are rare in today’s universities, normally committed to propriety, or political lackeyism. Their presence in these precincts calls upon instit...

In the early hours of August 2, 1990, Iraqi forces under the command of Saddam Hussein rumbled into Kuwait and seized its oil fields. “This is radical Saddam Hussein moving,” Bush wrote in his dia...

Margaret Thatcher’s notorious assertion over 30 years ago that “there is no such thing as society”, for which Britain’s first woman Prime Minister was pilloried for allegedly endorsing selfish...

Geoffrey Boycott has been conferred a knighthood by Theresa May, who often compared her own determination not to be ousted from the premiership with the former England opener’s obdurate batting styl...