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In 2009, when I interviewed Christopher Hitchens in anticipation of his appearance at the inaugural Festival of Dangerous Ideas, I used our last ten minutes together to ask his opinion of, among other things, Australian journalist John Pilger. “I remember
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, a thread. I put it to you that a great rabble of opinion writers, especially on the right, in the interest of criticising Australia’s lockdown policies, have magically and mindlessly transformed Sir Peter Ustinov
With the whole world lurching towards populism, nationalism, and, in some cases, outright authoritarianism, it can tempting to sit around drawing parallels between various deplorables. Marine Le Pen is to Matteo Salvini as Putin is to Erdoğan. Chan-o-cha is Thailand’s
Indian voters have just handed Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party a landslide victory and Modi a second five-year term. How that happened is no mystery, and might be a cautionary example for other democracies around the world. Modi launched his
The Rock disappears in the mist as Africa slowly emerges before us. To our right, Jebel Musa looms, one of two contenders for the southern Pillar of Hercules. Jebel Musa is in Morocco, though it is not to Morocco that
Against the cerulean blue of the South Australian sky, an octopus soars, its limbs flailing wildly. The man who has thrown it stands beneath, frozen, looking like a baseball pitcher, his leg just so. The spectators behind him crane their
When this series was first published in The Daily Beast last December, I had no idea that Kashmir was about to explode—quite literally—into the headlines again. There had been numerous developments in the region between my visit and the series’
In his 2007 dispatch from the Pakistani side of Kashmir’s infamous Line of Control, Christopher Hitchens called the area “the near-certain flash point of a coming war that could well become an Asian Armageddon”. That war came closer to fruition