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Posted on November 4, 2014 Leave a Comment
Last Sunday the last British combat troops left Afghanistan, and so a chapter of our history ended. Looking back, it is weird to realise that I do not remember, as I do with Iraq, the beginning of the war. In 2001, I was 6 years old – just conscious enough to be able now to recall 9/11, […]
Posted on July 4, 2014 Leave a Comment
Once again, Iraq is tearing itself apart. The country’s existence as a cohesive whole is now in more danger than it was at the height of the civil war in 2006/07, when the yearly civilian death count was over 20,000. Now, with a disintegrating Syria providing an ideal base for terrorism, Iraq is being threatened […]
Posted on January 1, 2014 Leave a Comment
It has become a media tradition around the New Year to look back at the highlights of the year – and, indeed, I have always done so here on Topical Creativity. This year, however, I am not giving you a blow-by-blow reminder of the past twelve months. Instead I present you with a list of […]
Posted on December 21, 2013 Leave a Comment
Hello everybody, and merry Christmas. Before we start, apologies for the lack of serious blogging; my writing has moved to Prospect of late. Still, I haven’t been writing enough, and I intend to rectify this over the Christmas break and into next term (when the writing will probably be of essays and sets of notes, […]
Posted on September 11, 2013 Leave a Comment
Perhaps the definition of a crisis is that the ground shifts so often that one starts to feel seasick. That is certainly a good description of the Syrian crisis, where developments are happening thick and fast – and coming from all over the world. It is safe to say that, over night, my last post […]
Posted on September 8, 2013 Leave a Comment
I do not remember the Rwandan genocide, nor the Bosnian war; Vietnam and Korea remain raw for many, but are history to me. Instead, I am of the Iraq/Afghanistan generation – I have grown up in a post-9/11 world where foreign policy has been dominated by the War on Terror. The lessons I have learnt […]
Posted on August 23, 2013 Leave a Comment
I often say that being a journalist and working with the news as much as I do has desensitised me. Political scandals, hospital failings, rigged elections, death and disease – this is what we are confronted with on a daily basis. Shock turns to surprise which in turn becomes cynicism. Analysing the news becomes more […]
Posted on June 18, 2013 Leave a Comment
Sometimes there is a problem to which no one has an answer, to which there is no answer. So it seems with the Syrian crisis – the ‘worst war of our time’ as one Newsnight reporter put it yesterday. Sorry Obama, Cameron and Hollande, for all your good intentions you’ll just have to wait this […]
Posted on April 7, 2013 Leave a Comment
10 months ago I wrote that a massacre in Houla, a small town in Syria, would act as a turning point in that country’s civil war. With the slaughtering of women and children, I thought, the world would not stand on the side-lines and let more deaths pile on top of these. At the time, the […]
Posted on June 4, 2012 Leave a Comment
All sorts has been going on. In the forefront of my mind recently has been the calamity in Houla, Syria, where dozens children were murdered by the army. The world is duly horrified and I believe The Times was right when it headlined the story ‘the tipping point’. The UN managed to get itself together enough […]
Lucy Webster 