Midway through James Joyce’s Ulysses, the character J.J. O’Molloytips his hat to ‘Our watchful friend, the Skibbereen Eagle’, a playful reference to an obscure provincial newspaper in the west of Ireland. Under an ambitious new editor, the Skibbereen Eagle had risen fleetingly to prominence in 1898 for its robust response to Tsar Nicholas II’s attempts
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In this special edition of Coffee House Shots, our political editor Tim Shipman is joined by historian, biographer and foreign policy adviser to four different prime ministers, John Bew. In his 7,000-word essay published in the New Statesman last week, John sets out the historical context which has contributed to the malaise and decline of
After the London conference, it is clear that “talking to the Taliban” will become part of the strategy in Afghanistan. But the conference left a number of important questions about what this means in practice unanswered. Talking to the Taliban is not a new idea. Even though he expelled a British and Irish diplomat for
David Miliband has become the latest to suggest that the Coalition must talk to sections of the Taliban in Afghanistan. The foreign secretary said it was necessary to build “an inclusive political settlement” which included former insurgents who could be persuaded to renounce violence. And he made an increasingly familiar distinction between ”hard-line ideologues”/jihadists and
