Wodehouse, Flaubert, War Poetry, Uri Avnery, Fisk and more

Earliest Wodehouse satires discovered

Letters reveal Flaubert's English 'amitié amoureuse'

Andrew Motion on war poetry

Bernanke: "I Had To Hold My Nose" Over Bailouts

OPINION: Yes, you can! —Uri Avnery

Book review: "Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner's Guide"

Israel's "open" Jerusalem closed to Palestinians

Israel's plan to wipe Arabic names off the map

10 Foods To Die For

But I also think that, militarily, we have got to abandon the Middle East. By all means, send the Arabs our teachers, our economists, our agronomists. But bring our soldiers home. They do not defend us. They spread the same chaos that breeds the injustice upon which the al-Qa'idas of this world feed. No, the Arabs – or, outside the Arab world, the Iranians or the Afghans – will not produce the eco-loving, gender-equal, happy-clappy democracies that we would like to see. But freed from "our" tutelage, they might develop their societies to the advantage of the people who live in them. Maybe the Arabs would even come to believe that they owned their own countries. Robert Fisk: Why does life in the Middle East remain rooted in the Middle Ages?