The Professor and the Spy

A while ago, eagerly and secretly, a professor at Edinburgh University began a correspondence over email with a man he thought was a Russian spy. ‘Ivan’, as the spy eventually took signing himself, wanted to thank the professor, Paul McKeigue, for his sterling efforts on matters of mutual interest. Those efforts, Ivan assured the professor, were appreciated by the boys in his office in Moscow.

Syria’s Decade of Death

Last month, Josie Ensor, a journalist for The Daily Telegraph, described the anguish of covering Syria’s war. Leaving the dissonance of Beirut, and the horrors of Syria, behind, she wrote, ‘Syria is where the world collectively lost its humanity’.

Losing James Le Mesurier

Earlier this week, in Istanbul, the world lost one of our century’s few true humanitarians. The death of James Le Mesurier was unexpected, and its cause remains officially unconfirmed. But the sum of his too-short life, though difficult to measure, is very great.