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Sometimes it is easy to forget why we study history. Of course, we use the past to understand the present; but also, ideally, we learn from it too. What a shame, then, that there is no space in the new national curriculum for the history of Byzantium. The eastern half of the Roman empire that […]

It was born in the ashes of World War II and grew rapidly during Les Trente Glorieuses, the 30 years of economic development that followed that conflict. It then matured, expanded, and acquired both a currency and a good deal of respect. By the start of the 21st century, it was feted as a great […]

Ronan McCrea is a barrister and a lecturer at the Faculty of Laws at University College London. His latest book is Religion and the Public Order of the European Union (2010). he European relationship between religion, law and politics is a strange creature. Religious influence over political life is weaker in Europe than in almost […]

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has announced that he wants to give away $45 billion. I’m sure he needs some advice on how to spend it. Here’s mine: He should use it to undo the terrible damage done by Facebook and other forms of social media to democratic debate and civilized discussion all over the […]

Amid all the panic over the EU’s mounting “migrant crisis”, let’s remember that we have been here before: in fact, a near-perpetual emergency has gathered force ever since the EU started closing its common external borders in the 1990s. Since that time, migration has come to be colonised by interior ministries and security forces as […]

Viděli jsme, že ve Spojených státech vzkvétají vedle etablovaných církví i četné kulty a sekty, zatímco v Íránu a jiných oblastech Středního Východu, v severní Africe a na indickém subkontinentu se dynamicky rozvíjí islámský fundamentalismus, jenž úspěšně vzdoruje západním vlivům. Severní Irsko zůstává po staletí ostře rozděleno na protestanty a katolíky, jejichž aktivisté mezi sebou často otevřeně bojují. Papež je na […]

What does satire do? What should we expect of it? Recent events in Paris inevitably prompt these questions. In particular, is the kind of satire that Charlie Hebdo has made its trademark—explicit, sometimes obscene images of religious figures (God the father, Son, and Holy Spirit sodomizing each other; Muhammad with a yellow star in his […]

Politickou stranu lze definovat jako organizaci usilující o získání legitimního podílu na vládě prostřednictvím volebního procesu. Za určitých situací existují politické organizace, které se sice snaží o získání moci, ale je jim odepřena možnost k ní směřovat obvyklými prostředky. Dokud jim toto právo není přiznáno, lze je považovat spíše za politické sekty nebo hnutí. Příkladem mohou být sociální demokraté v […]

Unsurprisingly, the twentieth anniversary of 1989 has added to an already groaning shelf of books on the year that ended the short twentieth century. If we extend “1989” to include the unification of Germany and disunification of the Soviet Union in 1990–1991, we should more accurately say the three years that ended the century. The […]

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a fellow of the Future of Diplomacy Project at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, a visiting fellow of the American Enterprise Institute and founder of the AHA Foundation. She is the author of the newly published book “Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now.” The ferment we see in the […]