Carpenter’s son Lech Walesa grew up in a small village west of Warsaw. While his parents were visiting relatives in America in 1973, his mother…
Browsing: Politics
A protégé of Joseph Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev came to power (after he and Aleksei Kosygin forced Khrushchev to resign) as general secretary…
1 9 0 8 – 1 9 7 3 Lyndon Baines Johnson was born in Stonewall, Texas, and trained as a teacher and lawyer. While…
John Malcolm Fraser was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1930. The grandson of an influential politician and businessman, Fraser was educated at Oxford University, and…
1 9 2 5 – 1 9 6 5 Malcolm X (born Malcolm Little) was a leader of the Black Muslim movement whose separatist views…
1 8 9 3 – 1 9 7 6 Born in the village of Shaoshan in Hunan Province, China, Mao Zedong was the son of…
Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s first female Prime Minister and the longest-serving British Prime Minister of the 20th Century, was an advocate of thrift, self-reliance, and hard…
1 8 9 3 – 1 9 8 0 Marshal Josip Broz Tito, the founding father of modern Yugoslavia, died aged 87 on 4 May…
1 9 1 3 – 1 9 9 2 Menachem Begin was born in Brest-Litovsk, Russia (now Brest, in Belarus), studied law in Warsaw and…
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was born in the northern Caucasus, studied law at Moscow University and joined the CPSU (Communist Party) in 1952. From 1955 to…
Having spent some $40 million on the convoluted Whitewater real estate scandal, independent counsel Kenneth Starr expanded his inquiry to include allegations that President Clinton had had…
In the early 1940s a young lawyer named Nelson Mandela established South Africa’s first black legal practice. In 1944 he joined the African National Congress…
Neville Thomas Bonner was the first Aborigine to be elected to Australia’s federal parliament. He lived in poverty in the New South Wales outback before…
1 9 0 5 – 2 0 0 1 President of South Vietnam between 1967 and 1975. He headed the South Vietnamese government during the…
1 9 1 8 – 1 9 8 9 Romanian politician, leader of the Romanian Communist Party (RCP), in power between 1965 and 1989. Nicolae…
1 8 9 4 – 1 9 7 1 A coal miner’s son from Kalinovka, Ukraine, Nikita Khrushchev became involved in trade union activities during…
Oswald Ernest Mosley was born in Manchester on 16 November 1896, the son of the fifth baronet and heir to a sizable fortune. Entering Parliament…
François Duvalier was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 1907, the son of Duval Duvalier, a justice of the peace from the French Caribbean colony of…
Paul John Keating was born on 18 January 1944 at St Margaret’s Hospital in Darlinghurst, Sydney. He grew up in Bankstown, a working-class suburb in…
An Arab organisation founded in 1964 to bring about an independent state in Palestine, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) consisted of several distinct groupings, the…