Review
Life on Earth: From beginning to end
The Earth Transformed: An Untold History by Peter Frankopan (Bloomsbury, 2023)
Any one-volume history of “an untold story” of the world “from the dawn of time” might be…
India's turbulent history newly revealed
Review: Crosswinds, by Vijay Gokhale (Penguin Random House India, 2024) and To Raise a Fallen People, by Rahul Sagar (Columbia University Press, 2022).
India’s role on…
Opium and the colonial narco-state
Book review: Smoke and ashes: Opium’s hidden histories by Amitav Ghosh (Murray, 2024)
Switching for a while from fiction to fact, Amitav Ghosh has written an account of …
What price sanctions?
Book Review: The Trade Weapon, by Ken Heydon (Wiley 2023)
Following the presumed assassination of Russian political opposition figure Alexei Navalny, the United States,…
Spy novels and unicorn hunting
“I wasted time and now time doth waste me.” Shakespeare’s rueful admonition (from Richard II) should nag at all of us who have expended energy on dead ends, red herrings or lost…
When war-planning and politics collide
Book review: War on the Ballot: How the Election Cycle Shapes Presidential Decision-Making in War, by Andrew Payne (Colombia, 2023)
Political scientist Andrew Payne…
Words as weapons in the war of ideas
Book review: The Book at War by Andrew Pettegree (Profile Books, 2024)
Millennia before Gutenberg invented the printing press, the Book of Ecclesiastes warned that “of…
How to fix Japan
Book review: The Contest for Japan's Economic Future: Entrepreneurs vs Corporate Giants by Richard Katz (OUP, 2023)
There is no advanced economy more in need of fixing than…
Why big projects fail: Climate change and AUKUS submarines
Book review: How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner (Penguin Random House, 2023)
We don’t need to look at detailed statistics to know that large-scale…
Manager of the internet, controller of the world?
Review: Underground Empire: How America Weaponised the World Economy, by Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman (Allen Lane, 2023)
Among foreign-policy thinkers of today, there’s…