The history of nuclear weapons lays bare the contradictions at the core of Enlightenment culture.
‘Sometimes,’ Philip Larkin wrote, ‘I think I’m preparing for a huge splenetic autobiography, denigrating everyone I’ve ever known.’
Playing musical chairs with the Nazis, and letting them win, is almost too perfect an image for the brand of appeasement Nancy Astor and her ‘Cliveden set’ embraced.
I’m not good at forgiving. It’s always been one of the worst aspects of my character, and now that I am old, there’s no chance it’s going to get better. I won’t have...
Every generation gets the queen mother it desires, or deserves (to adapt Jacquetta Hawkes’s remark about Stonehenge). Seemingly impassive as any megalith, she waved and smiled through a...
Before Anne Boleyn laid her head on the executioner’s block, she bent and wrapped the hem of her dress around her feet. She thereby ensured that, if in her death throes she were to...
On the morning of 24 June 1922, Walther Rathenau, the German foreign minister, set off for work from his villa in the Berlin suburb of Grunewald. The weather was fine, so he instructed his...
Jack Straw was one of the longest serving ministers in the history of the Labour Party. He spent 13 years in office, as home secretary, foreign secretary, leader of the House of Commons and...
‘They ran that woman out of County Clare,’ said one of the plain people of the West of Ireland, following the notoriety caused by Edna O’Brien’s fine first novel, The...
Thomas Babington Macaulay – later Lord Macaulay, and ‘Tom’ to Catherine Hall – was the most influential of all British historians. Sales of the first two volumes of his...
‘Anyone reading these notes without knowing me,’ Jacques Derrida wrote, ‘without having read and understood everything of what I’ve written elsewhere, would remain blind and deaf...
Ferdinand de Saussure, who died in 1913 at the age of 55, sowed the seeds of structuralist thought that first took root in linguistics, then effloresced throughout the 20th century in fields as...
As a child, I searched out lives of great women. Some of my heroines appeared on the back page of the comic I read then, called Girl: Eleanor of Aquitaine, Elizabeth Fry, Florence Nightingale and...
To be right when everybody else has been wrong can be a lonely, even disabling experience. This may be a way of understanding the enigmatic character of Joachim Fest, the German historian,...
The world hasn’t seen anything like it since Princess Diana’s butler went on trial for pocketing a few personal mementos of his late lamented mistress. Earlier this month, the...
I am not an economic historian, which did not prevent me from being friends with Eric Hobsbawm for many years. It keeps me from opinionating here about his work as a historian, a more than...
Jack Kerouac’s short life, big talent and last dollar were all just about exhausted when Joyce Glassman bought him a dinner of hot dogs and beans in New York in January 1957.
August Strindberg’s complete works in Swedish run to 55 volumes, not counting the ten thousand or so letters. He lived for 63 years, yet wrote sixty-odd plays, equalling Shaw, who lived...