Writing about myth and the stories we tell ourselves by Margaret Anne Doody, Marina Warner, Mary Beard, Anne Carson, James Davidson, Tom Shippey, Joanna Kavenna, Lorna Sage and Michael Wood.
Despite European and British efforts to emphasise the ‘traditional’ use of opium in both India and China, neither country had a history of production or consumption anything like those created by Western imperialism.
‘The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power.’ The subtitle of Sergey Radchenko’s book makes it sound like an aspirant bestseller from the height of America’s Red Scare. But don’t be misled . . .
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. Druze militias sacked Maronite Christian villages, killing eleven thousand people. Muslim mobs killed more . . .
We all judge by appearances. Oscar Wilde said that it is ‘only shallow people’ who don’t, but it might be truer to say that they fail to pay attention to the judgments they are making while they . . .
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.
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’.
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.
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.
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...
‘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...
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...
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...
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...
Writing about myth and the stories we tell ourselves by Margaret Anne Doody, Marina Warner, Mary Beard, Anne Carson, James Davidson, Tom Shippey, Joanna Kavenna, Lorna Sage and Michael Wood.
Pieces about Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, Henry VIII, Bloody Mary, Jane Boleyn, Christopher Marlowe and other royal bodies, by Hilary Mantel.
Colm Tóibín tells the story of Easter 1916, following the main personalities involved, including Thomas Clarke and Patrick Pearse.
From Medusa to Merkel, Mary Beard considers the extent to which the exclusion of women from power is culturally embedded.
Christopher Clark explains why the revolutions of 1848 weren’t failures, and why we should think about them now.
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;...
The only certainty about the picture is that it shows Francis Williams. No one has ever been able to discover who painted it, when, where or why. And then, a few months ago, everything changed.
Alberti the writer, first and last, was Alberti the reader, whose attitude towards ancient (and later) texts was anything but passive. He grew up in an age of textual discoveries – the hunting and gathering...
What is it about the body that resists plain description? When we discuss our bodies, we evoke other things: the body as machine, possibly malfunctioning; the body as computer, infinitely programmable....
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