Thabo Mbeki

Following the world's favourite politician will not be easy. But with South Africa's problems mounting and the "African Renaissance" stalled, can Mbeki step out of Mandela's shadow?

A modern ghost story

I told everyone that my father was dead. The ghost was easier to live with than the transience of the man

The age of plenty

People shopping at the Bluewater mall in Kent are happy, peaceful and rich. If 2,500 years of intellectual and physical struggle were not meant to achieve this, what were they meant to achieve?

Europe grows up

The end of the Santer commission was a curious, even comic, event. It provides a historic opportunity to improve the efficiency and legitimacy of EU institutions. But it is neither a crisis of the European constitution, nor the time to erase the "democratic deficit" by turning the EU into a supranational democracy.

Playing God

Genetic science has opened a moral and political Pandora's box. Should insurance companies have access to genetic information? Is widespread revulsion at the prospect of human cloning justified, or must our values adapt to the new boundaries between chance and choice?

Divide and survive

Anatol Lieven

History shows that partition and population exchange is often the least bad answer to ethnic conflict. Western reluctance to accept this fact prolonged the Bosnian war and could complicate the exodus from Kosovo. The alternative to partition in the Balkans is the presence of a large outside force-indefinitely.

The baby bombers

Baby boomer politicians like smart wars. But perhaps opponents of air strikes in Bosnia are being vindicated

An ageing rocker

Rock music's rough, confident spirit of rebellion has gone. Some of us can't help feeling nostalgic for it

Who turned the page?

Ian Hamilton has published just sixty poems in sixty years, but literary London has produced a surprisingly compelling Festschrift in his honour.

Modernism's last throw

The modernist dream of inventing a new aesthetic language which can only be understood in a utopian future, died with socialism.

These islands

Unlike Frenchness, Britishness never suppressed earlier identities. Will a Scots parliament come to its aid?

Previous convictions

Travelling as a tourist in the third world is a double curse-for the poor host and the rich visitor

Modern times

Jeremy Clarke

Miss Scattergood was a big hit at the old people's home, but then the silly cow went and died.

In fact

prospect