History & Classics

People​ love to talk about writers who once had radical sympathies but drifted rightwards with age. But the political evolution of the Peruvian writer and sometime politician Mario Vargas Llosa has been...

In the summer ​of 1860, an unprecedented wave of sectarian violence swept across Greater Syria. The massacre has long been studied but its causes remain misunderstood. Muslims, Jews and Christians of...

Joséphine Bonaparte and Térézia Tallien developed a new way of dressing that freed the body and redrew the female figure. The result was a high-waisted, one-piece dress in a light fabric, worn without...

Victor Serge’s self-conscious marginality, the cause of enormous struggle during his life, became a posthumous badge of authenticity: it helped reassure countless liberals and leftists that one could...

Christ himself made barely any pronouncements condemning sexuality. This has not stood in the way of Church authorities' lavish condemnation of all sorts of human desire.

With contemporary English including more than eighty thousand terms of French origin, Georges Clemenceau might have had a point when he argued that ‘the English language doesn’t exist – it’s just...

The will to colonise has not disappeared. Russia seeks to recolonise Ukraine. Israel relentlessly appropriates Palestinian land. Trump speaks of ‘reclaiming’ Canada, Greenland. The conditions that...

The point of the show isn’t to prove that reproductions fail to do justice to the original. The curators argue instead that reproductions have much to tell us about the production of art-historical...

Hamas had been able to take power in Gaza because Israel had failed to circumscribe Palestinian politics within the Oslo boundaries. But in the event, Hamas was useful to Israel's larger strategy of occupation.

Five thousand Leningraders died of distrofia on Christmas Day 1941. One of them was Aleksandr Shchukin, a 58-year-old botanist found dead at his desk at the All Union Institute of Plant Breeding just...

No one who has lived in Britain would contest that Oxfam (and Save the Children, War on Want, Live Aid and the other big aid campaigns and organisations) did matter a lot: they don’t need to be credited...

No doubt, some individuals have always pulled levers behind the scenes to benefit themselves and their families financially. But the authors of Born to Rule have no evidence that the inheritors of old...

The Great Transformation was an exceptionally bold effort to make sense of contemporary developments on an international scale by telling a quasi-historical story that linked the spinning jenny, Malthus...

James VI and I called the first duke of Buckingham ‘Steenie’ – short for St Stephen, who, it was said, had the face of an angel. Buckingham called James his ‘dear dad and husband’, and himself...

From frescoes and printed devotional images to incised amulets, moulded gingerbread and the stamped Eucharistic host, a wide variety of images has, at various moments in Western history, seemed worthy...

Perry Anderson brings a peculiar gift to the work of criticism: he can step into a book and inspect it closely, even sympathetically, scrutinising its structures, immersing himself in its style and atmosphere;...

Henry VIII’s relationship with his sister was never easy, and not made easier by her ready recourse to long letters that rarely achieved the level of sycophancy Henry expected, and were often written...

An ocean-going navy is not a workaday public service, like a coastguard or a constabulary. It is a grand project, an ambition, a national glory or a national shame. Its power is hard-gained and fragile;...