Power-sharing has not loosened Mugabe’s iron grip, says Ben Freeth, a farmer whose home and livelihood were destroyed by Zanu-PF militants On Sunday 30 August last year, as we drove back from church to our home in Chegutu, northern Zimbabwe, my wife and I spotted a large swirl of white smoke in the distance. We
Sarah Churchwell says the American craze for Amish romance novels — ‘bonnet-rippers’ — is just one part of a strange new fashion for conservatism and abstinence It has been 25 years since Peter Weir’s hit film Witness, in which Harrison Ford plays a policeman who falls in love with an Amish woman while investigating a
Did you know that February in our schools has been designated Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans (sic) History Month? I’d get with it, if I were you, and send your 11-year-old child to school in a gimp mask, with some lube. Good parents make sure their kid is ahead of the curve. You can bet
‘We are building an advanced socialist society,’ Czechoslovak communists claimed a couple of years before the regime’s collapse in December 1989. What did that mean? I asked Pavel Bratinka the other day. A former leading dissident, a devout Catholic and a physicist by training, from 1993 to 1996 he was deputy foreign minister of his
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was strictly optional. Most of the heroes of 1989 were middle-aged. The leaders of the velvet revolutions, the Vaclav Havels and Lech Walesas, had been through prison, tough times and many a defeat before this incredible victory. Sure, there were often students
When in 1983 I described Labour’s manifesto as ‘the longest suicide note in history’, I was drawing attention to the party’s apparently irreversible meltdown as an electoral force. When in 1983 I described Labour’s manifesto as ‘the longest suicide note in history’, I was drawing attention to the party’s apparently irreversible meltdown as an electoral
Judging only by its electoral performance, the Communist Party of Great Britain was a near-total failure in the 20th century. It only secured a tiny number of MPs at Westminster, while the party membership peaked at just over 60,000 at the height of Soviet popularity during the second world war. But this public lack of
In the pages of the Kremlin’s secret diary, Pavel Stroilov discovers what Labour’s Soviet sympathisers said when they thought no one was listening It is almost 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall — and still the truth keeps trickling out of Moscow. The Soviets, like the Nazis, were meticulous note-keepers and there
