[Janet Daley is a columnist for The Sunday Telegraph.]

So it's over. The Kennedy era, in which the political consciousness of most of my American generation was born, ends with a lingering illness and quiet mourning, so unlike the violent deaths of Ted Kennedy's elder – and greater – political brothers.

However much the youngest sibling may be lionised in the coming days, it was John and Robert Kennedy whose lives truly electrified American politics and whose assassinations almost certainly precipitated, as Norman Mailer once claimed, a national nervous breakdown. It was that catastrophic psychic blow, Mailer argued, that gave rise to the youth culture of the Sixties, with its bizarre mixture of high idealism and narcissistic pleasure – which, as it happens, was a particularly apt memorial (even if we didn't know it then) for the Kennedy dream. Having lived through that time at Berkeley, where we more or less invented what became the international student...

[Barbara Crossette, United Nations correspondent for The Nation, is a former New York Times correspondent and bureau chief in Asia and at the UN.]

Abdullah Abdullah, the most powerful challenger to Hamid Karzai in the presidential elections in Afghanistan, argues on his campaign website that "there can be no greater priority than regaining the trust of the Afghan people," a trust he now claims is being squandered again in voter fraud by his rivals.

While the votes are still being counted and the Electoral Complaints Commission is urging candidates not to rush into predictions and accusations, Abdullah, an ophthalmologist by training, might well be a little more forthcoming and expansive about his own history and what that would mean to his turbulent country should he be elected, or even force Karzai (no democratic paragon either) into a bitter runoff.

A political chameleon (a widely encountered species in Pakistan and India also),...

... In order to understand the significance of the ruptures of 1989, I want to put them into a broader historical context that began with the American and the French revolutions (themselves part of a wider movement that R.R. Palmer described in his classical study as The Age of Democratic Revolution). But the political possibilities opened by this emerging democratic revolution were not realized in either case, and still less elsewhere. Instead, the next two centuries were marked by the successive emergence—and, truth be told, relative success—of what I call forms of anti-politics. Before going further, I should stress that this concept does not refer to what many participants in the dissident movements in East Central Europe meant by this term. I do not refer to the opposition of society against the totalitarian state, nor do I mean the attempt to create an autonomous, self-governing civil society that could ignore the state, nor do I point to some form of existential “living...

[Orlando Figes is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author of many books on Russian history, the latest of which is The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia (2007). His books have been translated into more than 20 languages.]

In the second of a series of articles marking the outbreak of World War II 70 years ago, historian Orlando Figes analyses what the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact meant for Europeans in 1939 - and what it means today.

Seventy years on, the pact between Hitler and Stalin still casts a shadow over Europe. Its memory continues to divide.

For the Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians and Bessarabians, the pact began the reign of terror, mass deportations, slavery and murder which both the Nazi and the Soviet armies brought along with them when they co-ordinated their invasions of these countries in line with the pact's notorious secret protocols - by which Stalin and Hitler had agreed...

[Robert McCrum is assistant books editor for the Observer.]

When I was born in 1953, just after the coronation of Elizabeth II, I had a ration book. This flimsy, red cardboard log now looks like a passport to another country. Many things about that postwar Britain have become unrecognisable: cod liver oil, steam trains, rag-and-bone men, bobbies and telegram boys on bicycles and standing to attention for the national anthem at the end of cinema programmes.

Looking back, the black-and-white postwar images seem appropriate. Life in peacetime Britain was grey, threadbare, dreary and hopeless. There was a national sense of "Was this what we fought for?" As one American commentator put it, the British certainly believed they had won the war, but they behaved as though they had lost it.

Seventy years have gone by since the Second World War began and 64 since it ended. That dwindling minority of Britons, some 3 million, who lived through those...

[Ted Sorensen was special counsel and adviser to President John F. Kennedy.]


The death of John F. Kennedy's sister Eunice Shriver, the founder of the Special Olympics for the developmentally challenged, has given rise to a wealth of news stories -- obituaries and otherwise -- about the recurring tragedies endured by what some call America's "royal family."

All of these comments are well intended but off the mark.

The Kennedys have been a remarkable family since its founding roughly a century ago by Joseph P. and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy. But, its members have never asked for pity or privilege. Their history has emphasized more success than tragedy. Their love of family and country stood out during some of the most cynical and selfish periods in recent American history.

Like any large family, particularly one which deservedly remained in the public eye for many decades, a large number of afflictions and setbacks, also in...

For Catholics around the world, Aug. 15 is among the holiest of feast days. It marks the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, when the mother of Jesus is believed to have been physically taken into heaven after death so that her body would not suffer earthly decay. For the Catholics of Sri Lanka, Aug. 15 this year marked a similar miracle: the survival of a 500-year-old statue of the Virgin, through the fiery tumult of a quarter-century of civil war, which was re-ensconced in a jungle church that was once again safe to travel to.

The voice coming through the public-address system was familiar yet strange. I had not heard it in at least 27 years, not since I had traveled to the sacred Madhu Shrine in northern Sri Lanka in August 1982 when I was a child and on pilgrimage with my family: "Aandavane" ("Oh, Holy Lord" in Tamil), "Aandavane." The words spread through the church compound where half a million others had made the same journey to see Madhu...

As a long-ago friend and colleague of Bob Novak when we both worked for The Wall Street Journal in Washington, I lament his passing. In my 45 years in this business, I never knew a reporter who worked as hard as Bob. His typewriter and piled-high desk were only about three feet from mine, so I knew something of his work ethic. Later, his long-running syndicated column, though by definition filled with opinion, showed that he never quit reporting—as illustrated in the Valerie Plame case.

At his passing, though, I feel compelled to correct the record (as he wrote it in his memoir, The Prince of Darkness) concerning The Wall Street Journal's extensive investigation of the crucial JFK victory over Hubert Humphrey in the West Virginia Democratic primary in 1960. At some point, someone will surely do a biography of Bob Novak, and I—considering my age—might not be around then to be interviewed. And I am perhaps the only living person who can recount what really happened in The...

[David Marples, a professor of Russian history at the University of Alberta, Canada, is the author of “The Collapse of the Soviet Union, 1985-1991.”]

Sunday marks the 70th anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a nonaggression treaty between the two totalitarian powers of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, as well as a secret protocol that divided Eastern Europe into spheres of influence between Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin.

In May, President Dmitry Medvedev authorized a commission to investigate cases of historical revisionism of World War II to the detriment of Russia. The move followed the approval a year earlier of new school textbooks that reassessed the role of Stalin, acknowledging that he had made some errors but noting in turn his achievements and successes, particularly in the war years. Taken together, they symbolize the new Russian policy of identifying contemporary Russia with the former Soviet regime.

Last month, Russia...