Down the Rabbit Hole

David Runciman: Britain’s Europe Problem, 9 October 2025

Between the Waves: The Hidden History of a Very British Revolution, 1945-2016 
by Tom McTague.
Pan Macmillan, 546 pp., £25, September, 978 1 5290 8309 5
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“... sources (his chapter about the 1975 referendum, for instance, is based almost entirely on Robert Saunders’s Yes to Europe!, published in 2018). But it frequently feels revelatory when laid out in sequence. He also captures the peculiar atmosphere that permeates the never-ending political intrigue of the fight over Europe. For so many of those ...”

A Different Life

Thomas Laqueur: Can cellos remember?, 9 October 2025

Cello: A Journey through Silence to Sound 
by Kate Kennedy.
Apollo, 468 pp., £10.99, August, 978 1 80328 704 1
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“... Hermann’s at the 2022 Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels. (It was on loan to Lucas from the Robert Schumann Hochschule, a conservatory in Düsseldorf. How it got there is unknown.) Wang contacted the British cellist Julian Lloyd Webber, who in turn contacted Kennedy. On 29 September 2024 the cello, lost for eighty years, made its first proper public ...”

The World since 7 October

Adam Shatz, 24 July 2025

“... military assertion over diplomacy. ‘The most likely outcome of the war,’ according to Robert Malley, one of Obama’s negotiators in the JCPOA, ‘will be a situation of no war, no peace, more unilateral strikes.’ Iran will hunker down, focus on regime maintenance and hope for a better deal, while Israel will strike at Iran whenever it sees the ...”

Climbing the Ziggurat

Tom Stevenson: Xi Jinping’s Inheritance, 22 January 2026

The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping 
by Joseph Torigian.
Stanford, 704 pp., £40, June 2025, 978 1 5036 3475 6
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The Red Emperor: Xi Jinping and His New China 
by Michael Sheridan.
Headline, 345 pp., £12.99, July 2025, 978 1 0354 1351 5
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On Xi Jinping: How Xi’s Marxist Nationalism Is Shaping China and the World 
by Kevin Rudd.
Oxford, 604 pp., £26.99, January 2025, 978 0 19 776603 3
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“... Recent years have seen a spate of biographies of China’s 20th-century leaders, including Robert L. Suettinger’s Life of Hu Yaobang and Chen Jian’s of Zhou Enlai, both published in 2024.* We can now add Joseph Torigian’s biography of Xi Zhongxun. Such biographies necessarily intervene in several irresolvable contests. Were these men principled ...”

Holocaust History

Geoff Eley, 3 March 1983

“... as Anatomy of the SS State, and Uwe Adam’s Judenpolitik im Dritten Reich. Michael Marrus’s and Robert Paxton’s study of Vichy France now fills one important gap, while Randolph Braham’s new two-volume work on The Holocaust in Hungary, massively detailed, covering every aspect of the subject, and based on a lifetime of erudition, represents the ...”

History as a Bunch of Flowers

James Davidson: Jacob Burckhardt, 20 August 1998

The Greeks and Greek Civilisation 
by Jacob Burckhardt, edited by Oswyn Murray, translated by Sheila Stern.
HarperCollins, 449 pp., £24.99, May 1998, 0 00 255855 6
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“... Historians do not really belong to separate species and the best cultural historians, Schama, Robert Darnton, Natalie Davis, Greenblatt etc share much with Burckhardt, not least an exceptional talent for history, but the difference, in most cases, is more than one of narrative order. There is a satisfaction, a feeling of truth in the posing and solving of ...”

No One Leaves Her Place in Line

Jeremy Harding: Martha Gellhorn, 7 May 1998

“... of the Russian Zone and so forbidden to Americans. She was trying to sell a suit that belonged to Robert Capa, who urgently needed the cash. Keller appeared in the crowd. ‘He was neither buying nor selling; he was risking disciplinary punishment, I am sure, to see the Russian soldiers ... Not knowing Russia, as none of us did, he believed or hoped, or ...”

Boomerang

Sylvia Lawson, 18 February 1988

Australians: A Historical Library 
Fairfax, Syme and Weldon, AUS $695Show More
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“... the most unified of the slice books. It could well be read beside The Fatal Shore, complementing Robert Hughes’s information on convict life, extending the colonial landscapes, and importantly correcting Hughes’s simplistic view of the Aborigines.* When everything has been said about the ordeals of the convicts, their endurance and labour, and the ways ...”

North and South

Raphael Samuel, 22 June 1995

Coming Back Brockens: A Year in a Mining Village 
by Mark Hudson.
Cape, 320 pp., £16.99, October 1994, 0 224 04170 3
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“... and skills, chart the progress of disindustrialisation. Ian Jack’s Before the Oil Ran Out and Robert Chesshyre’s The Return of a Native Reporter are fine examples: picking over the debris of the factory system, they find their pathos in the spectacle of ghost towns. And then there is the literature on ‘sink’ housing-estates, which in contemporary ...”
“... research study done for the Commission). The main difficulty, as I see it, is that, as Professor Robert Reiner pointed out a decade ago, young Afro-Caribbean males are likely to become disproportionately involved in street crime since they are, as we know, disadvantaged in employment, housing and education, and they are bound, therefore, to be more often the ...”

Pint for Pint

Thomas Laqueur: The Price of Blood, 14 October 1999

Blood: An Epic History of Medicine and Commerce 
by Douglas Starr.
Little, Brown, 429 pp., £20, February 1999, 0 316 91146 1
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“... adopted the test, and how soon after the discovery of HIV it was developed. On 23 April 1984 Robert Gallo announced that he had found the viral agent that caused Aids: by March 1985 a test was in place. It’s worth pointing out once again that the delays had nothing to do with the cultural meaning of blood and everything to do with pushes and pulls on ...”
Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia 
by Orlando Figes.
Allen Lane, 729 pp., £25, October 2002, 0 7139 9517 3
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“... But when he finally returned to Russia for a visit in 1962, accompanied by the American conductor Robert Craft, Craft was astonished at the transformation he observed. Suddenly the man he knew, or thought he knew, became someone else: ‘Now I see that half a century of expatriation can be . . . forgotten in a night.’ Stravinsky was anxious to meet ...”

Seizing the Senses

Derek Jarrett, 17 February 2000

Edmund Burke. Vol. I: 1730-84 
by F.P. Lock.
Oxford, 564 pp., £75, January 1999, 0 19 820676 3
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“... A Vindication of Natural Society, appeared in May 1756. It was well received and its publisher Robert Dodsley offered 20 guineas for the copyright of the Philosophical Enquiry plus a further ten if it reached a third edition. The offer was accepted and the work was published in April 1757, six weeks after Burke married Nugent’s daughter Jane. He had also ...”

Diary

Alan Bennett: A Shameful Year, 8 January 2004

“... as once, at least, the river has seen slaughter. It was in 1388 that Richard II’s favourite, Robert Vere, led his army floundering along this flooded valley, desperate to escape his baronial pursuers, who eventually caught up and cut most of them down a little upstream at Radcot Bridge.15 February. R. and I go down to Leicester Square at noon, the Tube ...”

Love with Time Let in

Barbara Everett: ‘The Winter’s Tale’, 8 January 2004

“... are never curst but when they are hungry.’Shakespeare took his play from a novella by Robert Greene called Pandosto: or, The Triumph of Time. That subtitle may have been one of the things which mainly interested the dramatist in it, the other being the incestuous plot situation that drives its royal hero to his final suicide: when his lost child ...”