Monthly Archives: February 2009
Diplomats to the core – how Oxford continues to ‘inoculate the world with Balliol’.
5 July 1997 It is 6pm and a group of young men and women are filing in orderly fashion into one of Oxford’s more discreet academic buildings for a lecture on the global politics of environment by a former UK ambassador to the UN. Well groomed, well dressed, and soft spoken, these students from around the world cut a very different image to those who have been crowding into the university’s most popular pub, The King’s Arms, to celebrate the end of their finals. For these are no ordinary students. …
Counter-terrorism spy to take over as MI5 director-general
Published: March 8 2007 02:00 A career spy with a track-record in international -counter-terrorism is to take over as the new head of MI5, the Home Office announced yesterday. Jonathan Evans, the security service’s deputy director-general, will next month succeed Dame Manningham-Buller who announced in December that she was retiring after serving four-and-half years. Mr Evans, aged 49, joined MI5 in 1980, working on counter-espionage operations during the last stages of the cold war. In the late 1980s and the 1990s, he worked as a senior MI5 officer in Irish-related …
Life with Captain Bob
MAXWELL’S FALL By Roy Greenslade Simon & Schuster Pounds 4.99 Among the least edifying spectacles of the aftermath of Mr Robert Maxwell’s death was the speed of the overnight conversion of his flagship newspaper, the Daily Mirror, from docile servant to exposer of the publisher’s many sins. The newspaper that had proclaimed Mr Maxwell a ‘giant with wisdom’ was to go out of its way to condemn him as a devil. The Mirror’s exposes ranged from stories of widespread buggings of senior executives to mock-up photographs of Mr Maxwell with …
Superstar for the Nineties
Published: 30 November 1996 The musical Jesus Christ Superstar, first performed 26 years ago, is being revived on the London stage. It provoked cries of blasphemy when it first appeared. An author and journalist who was inspired by it then went to see the new version. I was 17 turning 18 when, back in 1970, the portrayal of Jesus Christ as a rock star first stirred my imagination and fuelled my enthusiasm in a way countless catechism lessons, sermons, and picture-book lives of saints had not done during my childhood. …
Survey of India – Sleeping giant stirs.
The rural masses show their consumer power, writes Jimmy Burns. Kherala, in the state of Haryana, some 50km south of Delhi, fits the image of the age-old village whose traditional values Mahatma Gandhi sought to preserve. But take a closer look and you’ll discover the modern age tentatively knocking on many a front door. Set well back from the main highway to the capital, the bulk of Kherala’s population of 4,000 live in squat huts made of crude cane and cattle dung. But most of the huts have TVs, electrical …
Argentina coach Diego Maradona writes another chapter in a turbulent life
By Jimmy Burns Published: 15 November 2008 Late one evening in September 1996, I sat sharing a table with former Argentine football star Diego Maradona in San Lorenzo’s in Knightsbridge, wondering if I was about to have my nose broken. I had just handed the world’s greatest football player a signed copy of the first edition of the unauthorised biography I had written of him, instinctively knowing that he might not like it, but feeling nonetheless that this was a necessary defining moment by which I could measure his willingness …
Guantánamo force-feeding claims spur calls for probe
By Jimmy Burns in London and Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington Published: October 7 2005 The Bush administration yesterday faced renewed calls for an independent inspection of its Guantánamo Bay detention facility following allegations that the US military was force feeding 20 detainees on hunger strike. Clive Stafford-Smith, a London-based lawyer acting on behalf of some of the detainees, said the prisoners were being fed through tubes in their noses. “To have my clients being restrained against their will, with a tube forced down their noses, after all they have been …
An invasion planned as a military coup
Published: April 1 2007 For a military operation which its commanders felt was blessed by God and the Virgin Mary, the conquest of ‘Las Malvinas’ by the Argentine junta got off to an inauspicious start. Around midday on 2 April 1982, the official raising of the blue and white national Argentine colours outside the Governor’s residence was interrupted when the flag got stuck halfway up the pole, snapped, and slid downwards. Two smaller flags – representing the Argentine navy and the 25th Infantry Regiment that had formed the main invasionary …
To bomb or not to bomb, asks the IRA.
Published: 25 June 1997 Sinn Fein may lose last excuse not to condemn violence. The word in west Belfast’s republican strongholds is that several “volunteers” have not been seen for days. Although some IRA activists continue to plot guerrilla tactics as they always have, an equal number – if not more – are engaged in one of the most critical internal debates in the republican movement since the run-up to the August 1994 ceasefire. At issue is whether the movement abandons once and for all its twin-track strategy of the …
