The one thing upon which the world’s major religions and most schools of philosophy are agreed are the perils and evil of human greed. Unfortunately, there are some people who didn’t get this particular memo. Take the Waltons, for example, the family behind the Walmart retail empire. According to the…

Few writers understood America’s racist soul as keenly as Richard Wright (pictured above), and few used their pen as mercilessly as he did as a weapon to excoriate and expose it. In black heavyweight champion and ring legend, Joe Louis, Wright found the perfect symbol of black resistance to the…

In his epic and comprehensive work, The Second World War, Anthony Beevor writes with customary economy: On 27 January in the middle of the afternoon, a reconnaissance patrol from the 107th Rifle Division (attached to the Red Army’s 60th Army of the 1st Belorussian Front) emerged from a snowbound forest…

“Therefore learn how to see and not to gape. To act instead of talking all day long. The world was almost won by such an ape! The nations put him where his kind belong. But don’t rejoice too soon at your escape - The womb he crawled from is still going strong.” ― Bertolt Brecht, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui At one time it was axiomatic in the West that post-World War II the Nazi swastika would forever remain a symbol of pristine barbarism and evil, and that wherever and whenever it appeared it would become the solemn duty of all…

“Sit down, son. It’s all over. No one will forget what you did here today.” The aforementioned words, spoken by trainer Eddie Futch to Joe Frazier at the end of the fourteenth round of arguably the most punishing heavyweight fight ever fought, when he faced Muhammad Ali in Manila on…

“I think the King is but a man, as I am.” William Shakespeare There appears to be mounting evidence that the head of the notorious Russian Wagner Private Military group, Evgeny Prigozhin, is angling for Putin’s place in the Kremlin. His bombastic tirades, via video, against the Russian military leadership…

Just over 200 miles north of Damascus on the banks of the Orontes River lies Hama, Syria’s fourth largest city with a pre-2011 population of 800,000. It’s an ancient city; its biblical name was Hamath and is thought to have been the capital of the Caananite kingdom, thus tracing its…

The name Assad has been inextricably linked with Syria’s fortunes since 1970, when Hafez al-Assad (above), while defence minister, came to power on the back of an intra-party struggle within the ruling Baath Party, which culminated in him staging the coup that put him there. Thereafter he initiated his self-styled…

Why, given the previous disasters of the West’s wars and interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, would the ‘masters of the world’ embark on yet another military intervention in the Arab and Muslim world so soon after, and in so doing confirm Marx’s admonition that ‘History repeats itself, first as tragedy…