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Margaret Thatcher, the Authorized Biography, Volume Three: Herseff Alone BY CHARLES MOORE Allen Lane, 1,008 pages LIKE ALL successful statesmen, perhaps like all successful people, Margaret Thatcher was a study [...]

It will be all smiles when Donald Trump meets President Xi Jinping this week in Osaka at the annual meeting of the G20: a show of comity for the cameras [...]

Even by the European Union's own standards of vaulting futility, the charade it will inaugurate on October 3 will be especially pointless. On that date, to great fanfare, the European [...]

Japanese banking is still mired in crisis. Although Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi and other large banks seem to be coming out the bad debt crisis that has ravaged Japan during the early 1990s, there are indications that the problems will not go away anytime soon. The Japanese banking sector is in a quagmire not because of individual managerial incompetence although this is still ingrained in the system. The problems are actually rooted in systemic weakness, with banks being over-regulated, under-capitalized and over-stretched. Therefore, although the worst asset quality crisis in Japan may be already dissipating, the features of the system that generated it remain entrenched. Banks and regulators are showing no sign of addressing them, thereby guaranteeing an unhealthy banking sector for an indefinite period.

London THERE'S A WEEK TO GO until the British election, and it's a typical day for Tony Blair. During the morning press conference, he is variously accused, by reporters and [...]

It's Hug-a-European Month for American foreign policy. First Condoleezza Rice inaugurates her tenure at the State Department with a grand tour of Europe's capitals. She wears tweed in London, speaks [...]

Des Moines If ever you wanted a true-to-life demonstration of the steadily rising tyranny of media hype over real-world substance, you could hardly beat the scene at the Polk County [...]

Last month, after weeks of frustrating inactivity occasioned by an ankle injury, David Beckham finally made his debut in Major League Soccer. The owner of the most famous foot in [...]

It takes skill to turn one of the most predictable and anticipated events in political history into a virtual showstopper. It takes something approaching political genius to pull off that [...]

Hong Kong will soon mark the tenth anniversary of its return to China. At midnight on July 1, 1997, amid the mournful downpour of a tropical monsoon, as British soldiers [...]

London It is four years this month since the 60-year-old transatlantic alliance, the pillar of European security, the bridge uniting the two great centers of Western civilization, nearly collapsed amid [...]

Nobody knows anything. William Goldman's famous first law of the movie business--that no one can say before the fact what's going to be a hit or a flop--is our new [...]

THERE MAY NOT HAVE BEEN such a consequential visit involving gifts for a newborn since the Magi came upon that star shining in the east a couple of thousand years [...]

AS ENGLISH PARENTS of five young girls who've lived almost their entire lives in these United States, my wife and I have spent much of the last decade checking off [...]

WHEN A BELEAGUERED BRITISH PRIME MINISTER fired a bunch of his closest cabinet colleagues in the 1960s, the grubby desperation of the move was well captured by an opponent's quip: [...]

AMERICA'S LEGISLATIVE LEADERS SPENT a good deal of time last week discussing what to do about 'undesirable' foreigners. Illegal immigrants were the main target. The Senate and House so far [...]

TWILIGHT IS HASTENING FOR TONY Blair. Though British prime ministers face no term limits, few can withstand the swelling tide of public boredom and familiarity's contempt. Margaret Thatcher set a [...]

TIME WAS WHEN THE SELECTION of a new leader of the British Conservative party was an event of some significance. For nearly two centuries, between 1800 and 1997, all but [...]

IT WAS ALWAYS A CHEAP SHOT to accuse the leaders of the antiwar crowd in Britain of working hand-in-glove with the terrorists. True, some of them in recent weeks have [...]

WHILE LONDON POLICE were sifting through the wreckage of three subway trains and a bus on the evening of July 7, an agitated woman was calling the emergency hotline that [...]

IN SCALE, IT WAS NEITHER a 9/11 nor even a 3/11. Though grisly, brutal, and indiscriminate, the terror attack on London produced many fewer casualties than the assaults on New [...]

As the dust settles after the explosive referenda at the heart of the European Union, interested parties from all sides are peering nervously into the crater, trying to figure out [...]

NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV once commented wryly that the only trouble with free elections is that you never know who's going to win. The old shoe-banger's words have been echoing around Europe [...]

Rome [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] MARIA, a twentysomething from Poznan with a gentle face, looks at me through bleary eyes. She has slept all night on a low wall that surrounds the [...]

UNTIL RECENTLY, attacking Alan Greenspan was regarded in Washington as the political equivalent of mugging Mother Teresa: not only wrong, but distinctly unwise. The Federal Reserve chairman was universally revered [...]

THOUGH PUBLIC REACTION in Europe to President Bush's reelection this month was predictably outraged, grief-stricken, and generally dumbfounded, it wasn't hard to detect behind the mask of uncomprehending disapproval a [...]