James Naughtie

Mar 25, 2025 | booksfromscotland.com | James Naughtie

By James Naughtie From one of our most treasured BBC broadcasters, the fourth instalment in James Naughtie’s brilliant spy series finds Flemyng back in Berlin, and alone as never before. It is 1989 and although the Wall is still the Iron Curtain, the end game of the Cold War has begun. Confident that one of his own agents can provide priceless intelligence from the other side, Will Flemyng throws himself into the climactic struggle between East and West. But fate takes a hand.

Aug 30, 2024 | inews.co.uk | James Naughtie |Heather Saul

To find Europe’s contemporary pulse, take a detour into its history. Weimar is a German city of modest size, but bulging with cultural history. Home to Goethe and Schiller, it’s a place of musical pilgrimage from Bach to Liszt and beyond. It fashioned its own golden age. Then it became a byword for failed democracy as the seat of German government from defeat in the First World War to Hitler’s accession.

Jul 21, 2024 | inews.co.uk | James Naughtie

It is surely the climactic irony of Joe Biden’s long political career that the feeling for a democracy in danger – which brought him out of virtual retirement to try to stop Donald Trump’s re-election as president – has now been subsumed in a street-fighter’s struggle to stay in power. Some of his dearest friends believe it could deliver Trump a chance to change America more profoundly that even Biden used to think possible.

Jul 7, 2024 | sundaypost.com | James Naughtie |Tim Knowles

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Jul 5, 2024 | inews.co.uk | James Naughtie

Keir Starmer was never going to talk about a rosy new dawn in the early hours of yesterday (“is it not?” – T. Blair, 1997) because, as has been said almost hourly since the election was called, that is not his style. And, as we know with just as much certainty, he and Rachel Reeves are squeezed into an economic straitjacket. So how does he give this government texture and character as it comes to life? It may not be as difficult as we’re tempted to think.