Mary Dejevsky

One of the country’s most respected commentators on Russia, the EU and the US, Mary Dejevsky has worked as a foreign correspondent all over the world, including Washington, Paris and Moscow. She is now the chief editorial writer and a columnist at The Independent and regularly appears on radio and television.

Mary Dejevsky: Who are you to judge artistic merit?

"So what does Libby Purves know about the theatre" was one of the kinder responses to the news that the Radio 4 presenter and columnist for The Times, was to become that newspaper's chief theatre critic when the current holder of the post retires this spring. Similar condescension, punctuated with indignation, greeted the simultaneous appointment of Kate Muir, another Times writer and novelist, to be the paper's film critic.

Recently by Mary Dejevsky

Mary Dejevsky: Ukraine is at last throwing off the shackles of the Cold War

Tuesday, 9 February 2010

This election was fought by and for Ukrainians, with no outside meddling

Mary Dejevsky: Experts I have less reason to believe

Friday, 5 February 2010

What was it that so tugged the heartstrings about the news that doctors had successfully communicated with a man thought to be in a vegetative state? For me, it was partly that my husband had taken the best part of three days to regain consciousness after a major brain operation, so I was reminded of the chilling sense of what if ... But it was surely also the glorious simplicity that shone through the complexity of what the neurologists had done.

Mary Dejevsky: A misreading of Iran that risks a fatal replay of Iraq

Tuesday, 2 February 2010

There is no evidence at all that Iran colluded with al-Qa'ida

Mary Dejevsky: Distracted by the Polish question

Friday, 29 January 2010

A strange little debate opened up and then closed, as strange little debates have a habit of doing. It was about whether Polish migrants were going home, and if so, what proportion. A report, commissioned by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, said that around half of the 1.5 million East Europeans who had come to Britain since 2004 had left, while a Warsaw professor, Krystyna Iglicka, objected that there was no trace of them either back in Poland or elsewhere. Her estimate was that around 1 million Poles were still in the UK.

Mary Dejevsky: It is too soon for Obama to succumb to defeatism

Tuesday, 26 January 2010

More than a year after their rout, Republicans still have no leader

Mary Dejevsky: Going, going, gone: the art of price and value

Friday, 22 January 2010

Around 6.30 last Sunday evening I took a call on my mobile. Within minutes I had passed responsibility for dinner preparations to my visiting sister, forsaken my (as yet unsipped) glass of wine, and set off through the end-of-weekend traffic to an address at the unfashionable end of Chelsea.

Mary Dejevsky: Haiti tests Obama's diplomacy more than it tests US aid

Tuesday, 19 January 2010

The task the US confronts in Haiti is almost the opposite of Katrina

Note to GPs: some jobs just have to be 24/7

Friday, 15 January 2010

Mary Dejevsky: All right, deep down many of us are simply jealous

Mary Dejevsky: Friendless in the wastes of St Pancras

Friday, 1 January 2010

As the festive season proceeded, I was positively oozing the milk of human kindness. Two days before Christmas, someone came from the electricity company, cheerfully proffering his ID, to do an actual meter reading. On Christmas Eve, I made it back from a family visit in time for the King's College carols, and on the day itself the pheasant almost cooked itself. On Boxing Day, the staff at Leigh Delamere service area could not have been more charming.