Richard Briand

The fall of the Berlin Wall promised Europe a bright future – so what went wrong?

From our UK edition

Homelands is Timothy Garton Ash’s first book since Free Speech, published in 2016, and is an account of Europe from the second world war to the current war in Ukraine, blending history, reportage and memoir.  On several occasions, Russia accepted Nato membership for the Baltic states and former Warsaw Pact countries Unsurprisingly, given how well-travelled the author is and how extensive his contacts are, among its great strengths are the personal encounters, experiences and anecdotes it relates. We learn, for example, of the Romanian pastor who, on hearing that Garton Ash is from Oxford, asks in all seriousness whether he has met John Henry Newman.

Grace under pressure | 16 February 2008

From our UK edition

Can a straight-talking Republican Senator, a decorated war hero at odds with the GOP establishment, win his party’s nomination for president? Richard North Patterson insists that the similarities between the hero of his latest novel and John McCain ‘end with his military career and penchant for candor’. There are, nevertheless, numerous other parallels between McCain and Senator Corey Grace. Grace is, after all, a fiscal conservative who opposes abortion but favours stem-cell research, supports campaign finance reform, and favours an amnesty for illegal immigrants. Like McCain, he is also prone to impetuous behaviour, which his enemies exploit to spread rumours that his period in enemy captivity made him unstable.