Hugh Pope
Author, Reporter, Editor
Category: Uncategorized
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When the news searchlight lit upon Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney last month as the saviour of democracies from US President Donald Trump and right-wing authoritarianism around the world, did it really show us a new path forward? Or did the Canadian ex-central banker’s well-turned speech at Davos just offer a sleeker retread of the…
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First sparks can be hard to fan into bright lights. Especially when they’re needed to banish dark demons lurking in the violent history of Iraqi Kurdistan’s six million people. Five years ago, a few Iraqi Kurdish health professionals and friends of Iraqi Kurdistan, mostly in Britain, had an idea. They wanted to introduce the first…
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It makes a welcome change to step aside and look back. Such a chance arose last week when I joined a few ex-colleagues for dinner with our old boss Gareth Evans, the long-serving former Australian foreign minister. Evans took over a small outfit called The International Crisis Group in 2000 and over the next decade…
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The US bombing of Iranian targets today got me thinking about how US actions in the Middle East have often propelled it into places that it had no apparent inkling about beforehand. I studied Persian at university, lived for year as a journalist in Iran and made several trips to the country during three decades…
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A review of “The Hundred Years War on Palestine: a History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance”, by Rashid Khalidi We talk a lot about the “news”. It’s a shame there is not a better supply of something we might call “olds”. Because when the world gets confused by a storm of what looks like…
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An account of what Google’s artificial intelligence machine NotebookLM told me when I asked what use my book Dining with al-Qaeda might be in helping outsiders to understand current events in the Middle East.
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If Western ways are all footnotes to Plato – who was a lover of elites, mostly – what does that say about our elitist democracies?
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Going to my own holiday home is at last feeling like a real vacation.
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Reflections on my discovery that two of my grandfather’s cousins died fighting near Ypres in Belgium, where I now live. My grandfather was injured in a separate battle nearby.
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Verity and Agatha hate being left behind by their father when he goes off on his travels as a British diplomat. So after he tells his daughters he’s being sent to visit a mountain kingdom in southern Africa, they wangle their way into joining him. When the King’s grand-daughter tells the young sisters of a…
Hugh Pope 