A few examples of some of my longer feature articles and interviews are linked to below. There are some formatting errors and phantom characters in the articles and I am trying to remove these errors when I have time. The articles are in no particular chronological order.
The feature articles represent only part of my work. For a more representative idea of my output while working in London (including news reporting for national newspapers and a humorous column), I kept an intermittent log of my articles in 2004/5 and have kept this online. I am currently working on two books so my periodical and newspaper work is infrequent.
In an incendiary polemic, Baruch Kimmerling attacks the violent policies of Ariel Sharon and argues that failure to see that Israeli and Palestinian fates are intertwined could reduce the Jewish state to a footnote in history. Chris Bunting reports
TO his enemies, Baruch Kimmerling is a traitor: a Jew who has betrayed his Jewishness. He has been accused of supporting the massacre of his fellow Israelis. Some rabid critics have even compared the writings of this survivor of the Holocaust to Hitler's Mein Kampf.
But if the Hebrew University sociologist's previous work has left a smouldering resentment among many of his countrymen, his latest book, Politicide - Ariel Sharon's War against the Palestinians, seems set to throw a stick of dynamite on the flames. Full article
As troops struggle to restore order to Iraq, the country's future and its past hang in the balance. Chris Bunting hears why the White House's favourite tale of reconstruction is inappropriate.
One by one, the dozens of brand-new Chevrolet Suburban SUVs that have gathered outside the Hilton Resort in Kuwait City over the past month have begun leaving for long, dusty journeys into the Iraqi interior.
Inside the hotel, the vehicles' owners can be spotted nervously knocking back their last non-alcoholic cocktails on the balconies overlooking the resort's golden sands before hurried departures. Full article
UK universities are racing to enter China, but will they get 'arrows in their backs' from a government that disdains free inquiry? Chris Bunting reports
Adam Roberts remembers Xu Zerong as a quiet fellow. He was "sort of solid, serious and devoted to his work. He certainly wasn't a flaming firebrand. I think he was someone who felt that his country was moving in the right direction and he discovered, in a very unfortunate way, that there are limits to that," says Roberts, professor of international relations at Oxford University. Full article
Shortly after being told she was being elevated to a professorship, Cecile Wright received a call from an academic in her field. "It was a white colleague of mine. He was clearly incensed and he said, quite bluntly, that I had only been promoted because I was black." Full article
To criticise the Sudanese regime is to risk arrest, torture and even death. However, reports Chris Bunting, academics are still able to speak their minds in the classroom.
On September 10, Shamsuldin Idriss, a student at Sudan's al-Nilein University, died in custody a day after being arrested in a government round-up of activists from the opposition Popular National Congress Party. Doctors who examined his corpse found brain injuries and bruising on his legs, abdomen and shoulder. The police claimed he died of "stomach pains". Full article
Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them, but no one in British history can have done so much to avoid greatness and yet achieved it in such large measure as an 18th-century toerag called Dick Turpin. Full article
Ideas can travel the world instantly, but the movements of those who develop them are being restricted: Refugee scholars in the UK live in fear of the immigration authorities' arbitrary power over them, says Chris Bunting.
Peter, a third-year chemistry student at a university in the London area and a refugee, was put in a police cell in October because the immigration authorities had lost his address. He had given it to them months before, but they couldn't find it, so he was locked up. He was released after a day. When he asked for an explanation, he was told it was the police, not him, who asked the questions. Full article
Anthony Hall was born into a world in which education was a "rumour" and crime a reality. "My mum's side of the family were offenders," he says. "I wasn't at school a lot. When you are at home getting the shit beat out of you, it is difficult to get your head switched on to school.
"Education, to me, was like whispers. It was like a rumour: you know it is there, you know people are doing it but you don't think you will ever get in," recalls the 30-year-old from Wallsend in Newcastle. Full article
From frills and thrills to nothing at all, Chris Bunting uncovers the hidden agenda of underwear.
Someone sniggered in the back of the court. Lee Bowyer, the Leeds United footballer accused of a brutal attack on an Asian student, had been asked by his barrister, Desmond de Silva QC, to change into the trousers and shoes he had worn on the night of the alleged assault. It was a dramatic court moment, but Bowyer stood still in the witness stand, apparently struck dumb.
Slowly, an awful possibility dawned on de Silva. "Are you wearing underpants?" the urbane silk asked his client. Bowyer's expression eased into a guilty smile and with an embarrassed glance at the public gallery he said: "No, I'm not, no." Full article
Sulak Sivaraksa's face is the most active thing in the restaurant.
What does he think of George Bush, for instance? His expression seems to fold in on itself as the cheeks expand outwards, the mouth puckers and the eyebrows crash down like a portcullis. Sivaraksa starts gesticulating vigorously. He looks like a man who has just taken a taste of a very very bitter lemon. Full article
THE dour corridor of filing cabinets that Stephen Heder uses as an office at London's School of Oriental and African Studies might, on second thoughts, have been a better choice of venue for the interview.
Instead, we had opted for a bright yellow-walled cafe nestled in a side street near the British Museum. While fellow customers picked uneasily at lemon cakes and cappuccinos, Heder's flat American drawl described "smashings" - the Khmer Rouge's brutally uneuphemistic euphemism for political murder - and the death of two million people in the Cambodian killing fields. Full article
WHEN Jack Mapanje was arrested by the Malawian secret police, they asked him what crime he had committed. It was not a rhetorical question or an interrogators' ruse. They really wanted to know what he might have done wrong.
"There was a huge oval table. At the head of it was the inspector general of police and the rest of the table was filled with the chief commissioners of police from the whole country. I sat in the corner and the inspector general said: 'Dr Mapanje, His Excellency the Life President has directed me today to detain you. Because this is His Excellency's directive, I am afraid to tell you that we are not going to investigate your case because it would look like we were not trusting the higher authorities.
"'But, because we are not investigating, I brought these commissioners here to tell me what it is that you have done, to find out whether you are in our books. They all tell me that they don't know of you. So, we thought, before we take you to where His Excellency wants you to be, we should ask you: first of all, who you are, and, secondly, why do you think we should arrest you?'" Full article
HUGH Brody has friends in communities across the high Arctic and the thousands of miles of forest that lie between the tundra of Canada's far north and the wide prairies of its cultivated south. Few have made as much of an impression on him as a Dunne-za Indian called Jimmy Field.
In his house in Highgate, Brody tells the story of a man who "was a kind of genius of that territory and way of life" Full article
When Nick Branch is on his favourite subject, you half expect him to throw up his arms and deliver, in his full-throated Welsh tenor voice, a rousing chorus of: "Mud, Mud, Glorious Mud! There's nothing quite like it for cooling the blood. So, follow me, follow, down to the hollow, And there let us wallow in glorious mud."
Branch has oodles of the stuff. Bags, buckets, tubes, trays, boxes and sacks of it fill his labs at Royal Holloway, University of London. He sieves it, sorts it, refrigerates it, waters it, dunks it in an array of chemicals, cuts it and, sometimes, just looks at it for hours in its original state. Sand is not really his thing, although he has been known to dabble. A bit boring, he says: not enough in it. Gravel can be a bit more promising. But mud sets his heart pumping. He is a mudlark of a very modern sort. Full article
A LITTLE knot of professors tumbles noisily from a freezing night into the lobby of the Adriatico Guesthouse in Trieste. Their evening has apparently been heavily lubricated with the delights of Italy's finest wines.
A cut-glass English accent peals across the ground floor. "Levin, I must say I thought your paper today was absolute rubbish," says Sir Partha Dasgupta, professor of economics and fellow of St John's College, Cambridge. "Utter nonsense." Full article
YOU have to admire the man's spirit. In 1682, Bartholomew Sharpe had just cheated the hangman's noose. Aged 32, he had about 16 years of piracy behind him, but in the previous two years had got himself into some particularly hot water.
He and 330 buccaneers had done what generations of Englishmen had dreamed of doing. After hacking their way across the jungles of Panama, they had stolen a fleet of Spanish ships and embarked on an unprecedented orgy of looting and murder up and down Spain's "private lake" - the South Pacific. Full article
ANTHONY Forde looks like a curious hybrid of a police officer and an academic. On top, the buttoned-up blazer and tightly knotted tie wouldn't be out of place at a freemasons' lodge. Below, the jeans and deck shoes quietly hint at senior common room sociologist chic. It is an unusual combination, but, for some reason, it sits comfortably on the founder of Britain's first undergraduate degree in police and criminal investigation.
A collector of stereotypes would be disappointed in the University of Central Lancashire academic. A serving policeman until last year, he exudes the down-to-earth, professional affability of an experienced officer. Answers to questions are brief and to the point. But Forde is no Policeman Plod, blundering around the halls of academe. No sooner are we in his office, than he is talking, with arms gesticulating, on the causes of death of Lindow Man. Full article
EDUCATION secretary Charles Clarke has had many nicknames in his rumbustious political career - "Biggles" because of his boundless enthusiasm and "two pizzas" because of his boundless appetite, to name but two - but the shaken-looking civil servant knocking back shots at the bar had a new appellation for his boss: "the rhinoceros".
"Estelle Morris was all very nice and fluffy. She knew her education stuff incredibly well. But you get the feeling with this guy that when he starts charging nothing much is going to change his course," said the mandarin, fresh from a "moderately terrifying" Clarke briefing. Full article
A solitary "matador" and a half-crazed bull replayed their parts in an old, violent ritual in a sun soaked arena in southern Spain. It was the summer of 1964 but film of the incident is still shown in lecture halls today.
As the bull bore down on the unarmed man it was apparent that he was no matador. In fact, the man at the centre of the ring, the renowned scientist Dr Jose Delgado, had never faced a charging animal in his life. Full article
"Julie" doesn't look like a victim of ageism. She arrived at one of Britain's elite universities last year aged only 22, with a clutch of three A-level grade As.
"I thought age wouldn't be an issue. I thought nobody would think about that. But it was an issue," says the law student, who does not wish to be named. "They were all 18 or 19. Most hadn't even been on a gap year and the discussion was dominated by the outcome of A levels, getting drunk and getting laid. I felt the fact that I had had a gap at all marked me out from them." Full article
EVERY afternoon, Albie Sachs listened from solitary confinement in Wynberg, South Africa, to boys as young as eight being beaten by groups of laughing policemen.
The screaming was relentless and the beatings so hard that he saw splinters of cane littering the passageway when he was allowed out for exercise afterwards. And yet he could make no complaint to the judicial authorities: the thrashings were being administered to the letter of the law, according to the sentences of magistrates. Full article
IT was the year of revolution in Europe. In 1848, France, Italy, the German states and most of central Europe were in tumult. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were just publishing their Communist Manifesto. Even in England, the tens of thousands of Chartists massing on London's Kennington Common in April were seen as a serious threat to the established order.
Meanwhile, 14 students at Cambridge University had more important matters on their minds. Full article
IT was the most disastrous translation mistake in history: a simple language error that may have helped kill 15 million people.
In the early winter of 1941, the US Government's small band of Japanese translators were working under huge pressure. Japan and America were not yet at war but Japan's attempts to carve out an empire in Asia and America's determination to stop her had left the two countries a misplaced word or two away from a terrible conflict. Full article