When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived in Beijing in May 2012 for a top-level conference with Chinese officials on strategic and economic issues, she got much more than she bargained for. A handicapped Chinese human rights activist, Chen Guangcheng, had managed to obtain provisional asylum…
Halloween, it seems, never fails to arrive in “Witch City” without a spike in tourism. These tourists have conferred the nickname on Salem, Massachusetts. For the past several decades, the otherwise ordinary Essex County community of 41,000 has been the destination of people with a sometimes-lurid…
Ever since the death of J. Edgar Hoover in 1972, journalists and disparate authors have pored over his life in order to dissect its mysteries. There have been books about his (alleged) gay activities and darker allegations that he used his powers as director of the FBI for manipulative political…
Declinist literature about America hasn’t been so fashionable since, well, since the Russians beat us into space with Sputnik, or the Japanese seemed to be buying up every American golf course west of the Mississippi in the 1980s, or China commissioned its first aircraft carrier in 2012. Gloom…
The year 1946 was vintage for Churchillian rhetoric, with two speeches that significantly affected the history of the West—and, indeed, the world.
Thirty-eight years after the last American helicopter took off from the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon, it might not seem possible for any new book to offer important insights and reporting on the Vietnam war.
It will probably never be known how many people died because they were betrayed by Kim Philby to the NKVD, or its successor, the KGB. Konstantin Volkov, a KGB agent working under diplomatic cover as a consular officer in Istanbul in 1945, is just one standout example. For the sum of £5,000, Volkov…
It is universally recognized that the Allied victory over Japan and Germany in World War II could not have happened without America’s becoming, in Franklin Roosevelt’s words, “the arsenal of democracy.” The basic figures of American war production are simply gargantuan. The United States…
It is not so much a truism as a cliché that the Victorian era has been the target of popular denigration ever since Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918) demolished a few of its icons of moral excellence: Florence Nightingale and General Gordon of Khartoum, among others. Strachey was a sort…
Many of us who had spent years reporting on China watched with a feeling of slow-motion tragedy the unfolding of events in the Chinese capital in the spring of 1989, when student-led democracy protests started in Beijing and then across the country. Ultimately, it ended two months later in brutal…
Africa has had its share of brutal regimes and rulers in the past half-century. The apartheid regime of the Afrikaners in South Africa was, for quite a long time, a model of well-planned and methodical dictatorship. The eight-year half-comical/half-nightmarish regime of Idi Amin in Uganda appeared,…
God of Liberty
The Closing of the Muslim Mind
The Grand Jihad
The Next 100 Years
The Soul of a Leader
Foul Bodies
David and Winston
Hubbub
History's Locomotives
The Looming Tower
Haifa, Israel
The Israelis
Hong Kong
Time for Truth
Yei, Southern Sudan
GALINA STAROVOITOVA was a brilliant and memorable member of Russia's Duma. To admirers, she was a lioness, fiercely defending Russia's ethnic minorities from the tyranny of surrounding majorities. She championed decency in the face of all forms of bigotry, and grasped the folly of attempting to…
From the externals, you couldn't have guessed that the gathering was in any way remarkable. The dozen or so participants came one by one, over several days, to a spacious, sparsely furnished suburban house in one of China's most populous provinces. Most of them were men, in their forties or older.…
Moscow
HE COULD EASILY PASS for one of the tens of thousands of young Chinese studying at American universities. His smooth skin, boyish looks, and modest demeanor might be those, say, of an astrophysics researcher at M.I.T. But though Wang Dan, 29, earnestly stresses his desire to study in the United…
Alexander Lebed
"I have spent 33 years of my 64-year-old life in Chinese prisons and Laogai labor camps in Tibet. During those years I yearned for a moment such as this one." Palden Gyatso, a Tibetan nationalist who escaped from Tibet in 1992, finally got his moment two years ago. He was testifying, along with…
Dmitry Mikheyev
"Liberty, liberty, what [crimes have been committed in your name!" went the cry as the tumbrels of the French Revolution lumbered toward the guillotine. In the two centuries since, the bloodthirsty appetite of revolution, no longer calling for liberty, has grown with each new scheme for…
IT IS NOT EVERY DAY that a New York Times reporter, even after his death, is lauded as "a brilliant correspondent" by the president of the United States, celebrated by nationally syndicated newspaper columnist Cal Thomas as having brought "honor and distinction" to the profession of described by…
HIS HEALTH IS LESS RELIABLE NOW, and the strain of life -- not just in t he Gulag halfa century ago but also in the struggling Russia of today -- has ta ken its toll. He still walks briskly, but he rests more, and he measures his public appearances with the careful weighing of necessity and risk…
Hebron has always been a Jewish city, is a Jewish city, and will forever remain a Jewish city. And no amount of human effort will change the facts of God." That statement, made in Jerusalem's International Convention Center in mid-October by U.S.-born Eliezer Waldman, a leader of the 450 or so…