All American. Gods of our fathers: the United States of enlightenment
The private Jefferson
Jefferson vs. the Muslim pirates
Benjamin Franklin: free and easy
John Brown: the man who ended slavery
Abraham Lincoln: misery's child
Mark Twain: American radical
Upton Sinclair: a capitalist primer
JFK: in sickness and by stealth
Saul Bellow: the great assimilator
Vladimir Nabokov: Hurricane Lolita
John Updike: No way ; Mr. Geniality
Vidal Loco
America the Banana Republic
An Anglosphere future
Political animals
Old enough to die
In defense of foxhole atheists
In search of the Washington novel
Eclectic Affinities. Isaac Newton: flaws of gravity
The men who made England: Hilary Mantel's "Wolf Hall"
Edmund Burke: reactionary prophet
Samuel Johnson: demons and dictionaries
Gustave Flaubert: I'm with Stupide
The dark side of Dickens
Marx's journalism: the Grub Street years
Rebecca West: things worth fighting for
Ezra Pound: a revolutionary simpleton
On "Animal Farm"
Jessica Mitford's poison pen
W. Somerset Maugham: Poor Old Willie
Evelyn Waugh: the permanent adolescent
P. G. Wodehouse: The Honorable Schoolboy
Anthony Powell: An Omnivorous Curiosity
John Buchan: Spy Thriller's Father
Graham Greene: I'll be damned
Death from a salesman: Graham Greene's bottle ontology
Loving Philip Larkin
Stephen Spender: a nice bloody fool
Edward Upward: the captive mind
C. L. R. James: mid off, not right on
J. G. Ballard: the catastrophist
Fraser's Flashman: scoundrel time
Fleet Street's finest: from Waugh to Frayn
Saki: where the wild things are
Harry Potter: the boy who lived
Amusements, annoyances, and disappointments. Why women aren't funny
Stieg Larsson: the author who played with fire
As American as apple pie
So many men's rooms, so little time
The new commandments
In your face
Wine drinkers of the world, unite
Charles, Prince of Piffle
Offshore accounts. Afghanistan's dangerous bet
First, silence the whistle-blower
Believe me, it's torture
Iran's waiting game
Long live democratic seismology
Benazir Bhutto: daughter of destiny
From Abbottabad to worse
The perils of partition
Algeria: a French quarrel
The case of Orientalism
Edward Said: where the Twain should have met
The swastika and the cedar
Holiday in Iraq
Tunisia: at the desert's edge
What happened to the suicide bombers of Jerusalem?
Childhood's end: an African nightmare
The Vietnam Syndrome
Once upon a time in Germany
Worse than "Nineteen Eighty-four"
North Korea: A nation of racist dwarves
The eighteenth brumaire of the Castro dynasty
Hugo Boss
Is the Euro doomed?
Overstating Jewish power
The case for humanitarian intervention
Legacies of totalitarianism. Victor Serge: pictures from an inquisition
André Malraux: one man's fate
Arthur Koestler: the zealot
Isabel Allende: Chile Redux
The Persian version
Martin Amis: lightness at midnight
Imagining Hitler
Victor Klemperer: survivor
A war worth fighting
Just give peace a chance?
W. G. Sebald: requiem for Germany
Words' worth. When the king saved God
Let them eat pork rinds
Stand up for Denmark!
Eschew the taboo
She's no fundamentalist
Burned out
Easter charade
Don't mince words
History and mystery
Words matter
This was not looting
The "other" L-word
The you decade
Suck it up
A very, very dirty word
Prisoner of shelves