'We are seeing the cracks of Israeli politics play out in the West Bank'

Published for the first time this month, the Irish writer’s record of his months in pre-war Germany is a fascinating insight into his understanding of, and unease with, Nazism War was not yet on the immediate horizon when Samuel Beckett visited the German city of Hamburg in October 1936, but after watching the apoplexy that Adolf Hitler’s braying induced in ordinary Germans, the Irish playwright was certain that peace could not last. “They’ll need to fight soon (or burst),” he noted in his diary on 6 October. The six notebooks that Beckett compiled during his six-month journey across Germany between late September 1936 and April 1937, published for the first time by German publisher Suhrkamp on 20 August this year, put paid to a commonly held view of the author of Waiting for Godot as a poet of pure pessimism, interested in despair and stasis but unconcerned by real-life politics...

China has “strongly condemned” Japanese leaders for visiting the controversial Yasukuni Shrine and making an offering on the 81st anniversary of Japan’s announcement of surrender in World War II. Beijing lodged a formal protest after Japanese defence chief Shinjiro Koizumi visited the shrine on Saturday. China and many other countries in Asia view the site as a symbol of Japanese militarism. Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi did not visit the site in person but she sent a ritual offering to...

The government has been taking a fortnightly review to ensure domestic availability of the retail fuels