History & Classics

Painting: Pieter Bruegel the Elder's 'The Tower of Babel'

Death of the Book

Adam Smyth

7 March 2024

At the heart of Brian Cummings’s Bibliophobia is a sense of the book as a ‘liminal object’, by which Cummings means that the book is both vessel and object, something that carries and something that is: ‘a transaction between physical and mental universes’.

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Imitating Germany

Richard J. Evans

7 March 2024

During​ the Second World War and the decades that followed, historians of modern Germany focused on one question: how did Nazism, with its negation of freedom and democracy, its aggressive commitment . . .

Rave On

Chal Ravens

7 March 2024

On​ 21 July 1990 a rave ended in the biggest mass arrest in British history. To get to Love Decade, as the party was called, you first had to call a telephone hotline, which disclosed the location of . . .

Fans and Un-Fans

Ferdinand Mount

22 February 2024

Carefree:​ that must be the essence of the sporting idea, whether you are doing it with Amaryllis in the shade, or on the village green with your grandchild Wilhelmine. You are disported, carried off . . .

In Mostyska

Keiron Pim

22 February 2024

In spring​ 2019 I stood in a meadow outside the small Ukrainian town of Mostyska, squinting at a transliteration of the Mourner’s Kaddish on my phone. A local farmer had directed my guide towards a . . .

The Public Voice of Women

Mary Beard, 20 March 2014

Public speech was a – if not the – defining attribute of maleness. A woman speaking in public was, in most circumstances, by definition not a woman.

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Watch this man: Niall Ferguson’s Burden

Pankaj Mishra, 3 November 2011

He sounds like the Europeans described by V.S. Naipaul – the grandson of indentured labourers – in A Bend in the River, who ‘wanted gold and slaves, like everybody else’, but also ‘wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves’.

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Diary: Working Methods

Keith Thomas, 10 June 2010

It is possible to take too many notes; the task of sorting, filing and assimilating them can take for ever, so that nothing gets written. The awful warning is Lord Acton, whose enormous learning never resulted in the great work the world expected of him.

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‘What a man this is, with his crowd of women around him!’: Springtime for Robespierre

Hilary Mantel, 30 March 2000

Robespierre thought that, if you could imagine a better society, you could create it. He needed a corps of moral giants at his back, but found himself leading a gang of squabbling moral pygmies. This is how Virtue led to Terror. 

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The Sound of Voices Intoning Names

Thomas Laqueur, 5 June 1997

In a happier age, Immanuel Kant identified one of the problems of understanding any of the genocides which come all too easily to mind. It is the problem of the mathematical sublime. The...

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Identity Parade

Linda Colley, 25 February 1993

‘Iwill never, come hell or high water, let our distinctive British identity be lost in a federal Europe.’ John Major’s ringing assurance to last year’s Conservative Party...

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Goodbye Columbus

Eric Hobsbawm, 9 July 1992

Afew weeks ago, in Mexico, I was asked to sign a protest against Christopher Columbus, on behalf of the original native populations of the American continents and islands, or rather, of their...

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Grim Eminence

Norman Stone, 10 January 1983

The historian Edward Hallett Carr died on 3 November 1982, at the age of 90. He had an oddly laconic obituary in the Times, which missed out a great deal. If he had died ten years before, his...

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War and Peace

A.J.P. Taylor, 2 October 1980

War has been throughout history the curse and inspiration of mankind. The sufferings and destruction that accompany it rival those caused by famine, plague and natural catastrophes. Yet in nearly...

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The peculiarities of the British constitution mean that it requires the combined input of the disciplines of law, politics and history – each with its own priorities, sensitivities and hinterlands of...

Read more about Highbrow Mother Goose: Constitutional Dramas

Multiplying Marys: On Mary Magdalene

Marina Warner, 22 February 2024

Devotees often exult in the stripping of her beauty and her wealth; she is imagined as a woman of substance, who owned property in Magdala (hence her name), and when she repents and gives all this up,...

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Unicorn or Narwhal? Linnaeus makes the rules

Lorraine Daston, 22 February 2024

Linnaeus’s personal contradictions do not make him a historical chimera. If he sounds odd to those who hold a view of Enlightenment science as rational and orderly, perhaps that’s because real Enlightenment...

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Our Way of Proceeding: Jesuit Methods

Diarmaid MacCulloch, 22 February 2024

What​ was this Society for which Pope Paul III provided a charter? It was not a religious order, though it is often styled as such. Its members were neither monks nor friars. Its self-descriptor as a...

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Strike at the Knee: Italy, 1943

Malcolm Gaskill, 8 February 2024

The gruelling, often grotesque nature of the Italian campaign is reason enough to remember it, but it’s been overlooked, idly regarded as filler between the defeat of Rommel and the Normandy Landings.

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To write about gay men in Britain in the 19th century should be to write about them as sons, brothers, friends, lovers, husbands, fathers, grandparents, members of a social class, employees, employers,...

Read more about Balzac didn’t dare: Origins of the Gay Novel

There’s a voyeuristic quality to so many of the discussions of Anne’s rise and fall, since it was allegedly her sexual allure that made her queen and her sexual licence that led to her death. The compulsion...

Read more about Whip with Six Strings: Anne Boleyn’s Allure

Diary: Looking for Indraprastha

Raghu Karnad, 8 February 2024

Moving the Sanskrit epics ‘from mythology to history’ turns out to mean the obliteration of an archaeological site by a construction site. This is the kind of historical reckoning which India’s present...

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Wreckage of Ellipses: On Enheduana

Anna Della Subin, 8 February 2024

The Sumerian priestess Enheduana managed the complex affairs of the temple and wrote poems, among them a collection of temple hymns that sought to accomplish in verse what her father, Sargon of Akkad,...

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I know a good deal about the Bonhomme Richard. I know that it was originally a French merchant vessel called the Duc de Duras; that it was loaned to the fledgling US navy; and that it took part in the...

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Petrifying Juices: Fossilised

Liam Shaw, 25 January 2024

Like sculptures, fossils need curators. A raw lump of stone must be prepared and cleaned before it can be studied as a fossil; scientists of the past may well have inadvertently destroyed interesting surface...

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Bertie Wooster in Murmansk

Sheila Fitzpatrick, 25 January 2024

Apart from getting rid of the Bolsheviks, the aims of the Western intervention were remarkably ill-defined. Sometimes it was to protect British interests and keep the Germans, Turks, Poles, or Japanese...

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Antidote to Marx: Oh, I know Locke!

Colin Kidd, 4 January 2024

Contrary to the myth that from itsa founding document America was dedicated to capitalism, private property and the personal accumulation of wealth, ‘happiness’ in its 18th-century definition meant...

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Short Cuts: Edinburgh’s Festivalisation

Rory Scothorne, 4 January 2024

You can’t buy what Edinburgh has. You can, however, rent out certain kinds of access to it. This, as  David Harvey writes, is a recipe for self-destruction. The influx of international capital produces...

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Even the Eyelashes: Inca Mummies

Erin L. Thompson, 4 January 2024

The Chinchorro culture began mummifying their dead in what is now southern Peru and northern Chile around 6000 BCE, making South America’s earliest mummified bodies two thousand years older than those...

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When Paris Sneezed: The Cult of 1789

David Todd, 4 January 2024

The awesomeness of 1789 as a model of human emancipation inspired revolutionaries of various kinds – liberal, socialist, anticolonialist – worldwide until at least the mid-20th century. Only the Anglo-American...

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Who’d want to be English?

Tom Shippey, 4 January 2024

The Hundred Years War created a sense of nationhood, especially in France. In England, the Anglo-Norman dialect died out, and though French was still part of the equipment of ladies and gentlemen, it was...

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Israel’s security is Germany’s Staatsräson, as Angela Merkel put it in 2008. Solidarity with the Jewish state has burnished Germany’s proud self-image as the only country that makes public remembrance...

Read more about Memory Failure: Germany’s Commitment to Israel

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