Everybody knows that President George W Bush is not the sharpest set of spurs in the political stable. The question the transatlantic left has more trouble answering is if Bush is as stupid as they say, why is he winning? Whatever else the spokesmen for the old left have lost, they retain sufficient powers of self-delusion to avoid blaming themselves. Instead, fingers are pointed at a powerful conspiracy behind Bush, [...]

An unwritten rule of history is that any non-western leader with whom our governments come into conflict has to be mad and bad with a Hitler complex and appalling personal habits, ranging from kinky sex to cannibalism. So Saddam Hussein is not just a problem, but a psychopath.

But away from the propaganda cartoons, what are they like, these "mad" Arabs, Africans, Latin Americans and eastern Europeans? In Talk of [...]

This piece should probably begin with the disclaimer "I'm not a Trotskyist, but . . ." Talking to other journalists about my past life as editor of the late Living Marxism magazine, an intelligent Tory (that is to say, he no longer works for the party) asked me: "Which end of the ice pick were you in the old days?" In other words, did my sympathies lie with Leon Trotsky, [...]

Good front cover: man balancing on precarious pile of furniture atop New York skyscraper, circa 1930. Great subtitle: "learning to live with uncertainty", which is something we all need to do. For a moment, I thought this book might offer insight into our unhealthy obsession with potential risks to our health and welfare. But, in essence, it is nothing more than another psychobabbling self-help manual, designed for those of us [...]

Once upon a time, a hundred years or so ago, it was fashionable to attack something called "Jewish capitalism". August Bebel, a German friend of Karl Marx, described this attempt to give anti-Semitism a progressive spin as "the socialism of fools".

Today's fashion for Israel-bashing seems to me to represent a similar foolishness. It is not old-fashioned anti-Semitism. But there is a growing tendency to endorse dubious ideas under the [...]

Like some dreadful progressive rock album of the 1970s, Tariq Ali's new book seems likely to become better known for its cover than its contents. The cover is intended to illustrate what the author calls "the clash of fundamentalisms" by depicting George W Bush as a mullah and Osama Bin Laden as a US president. It succeeds only in illustrating, unintentionally, this messy book's own identity crisis, caught as it [...]

Greg Palast is a pain in the arse (or "ass", as they say where he comes from), and proud of it. The press release for the investigative reporter's new book boasts that he is "despised by all the right people" in Tony Blair's Whitehall and George Bush's Washington. But then, Palast also manages to irritate some of us who might expect to be more sympathetic to his criticisms of the [...]

Why has this book been published now, a decade after the end of the cold war? It's not as if, despite all the conflicts in the world today, there is any prospect of a revival of communism. Among all the symbolism that has been read into the events of 11 September, the terrorist attacks on the United States can also be seen as an epitaph for the international left. It [...]

This book will need a new introduction when the paperback edition comes out. What Kate Berridge describes as "the new pornography of death" was much in evidence after 11 September, in the full-page colour pictures of a four-year-old girl killed on a hijacked plane, the broadcast tapes of those last terrible mobile phone messages from victims, and the self-indulgent articles from the literati about how watching death live on TV [...]

In a recent Mirror column on the foot-and-mouth crisis, Tony Parsons, the popular novelist, likened pictures of Phoenix the calf to the famous photograph of a small boy holding up his hands as Nazi troops herd Jews from the Warsaw ghetto on to trains bound for the death camps. Just as that "one doomed child" had become "a symbol of all the horror of the attempted extermination of the Jews", [...]