History & Classics

Cardinal Directions

James Vincent

17 April 2025

The compass retains a sense of romance. It’s pleasingly approximate, twitchy and impulsive. It feels alive in a way that Google Maps does not, partly because it is a natural instrument, in the sense that it operates according to the provisions of nature.

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Cold War Pen-Pals

Miriam Dobson

17 October 2024

In​ 1971, an elderly bookseller in Berkshire, Harold Edwards, began writing to the Aidov family in Moldavia. Slava Aidov was serving time in Dubravlag, a Soviet camp for political prisoners, and his . . .

When Peasants Made War

Malcolm Gaskill

17 April 2025

In​ 1524, astrologers warned of calamity in southern Germany: floods and failed harvests, sickness and war. The clergy would ‘drink the cup of bitterness’. But peasant disquiet was sufficiently visible . . .

African Students in Britain

Gazelle Mba

17 April 2025

William Ansah Sessarakoo’s​ father, John Corrantee of Annamaboe, on the Gold Coast, was a member of the Fante ruling family and a prominent merchant, well known in the interior and among European slave . . .

The Iranian Embassy Siege

Patrick Cockburn

17 April 2025

In​ the late morning of 30 April 1980, I left my flat at 90 Westbourne Terrace, near Paddington Station, to walk across Kensington Gardens to the Iranian embassy on Princes Gate. I wanted a visa to visit . . .

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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In the 18th and 19th centuries, Britain and Russia did not seek to divide the world between them and very rarely pointed weapons at each other. More often they were allies, for fifteen years against Napoleon,...

Read more about Dancing the Mazurka: Anglo-Russian Relations

Diary: Rome, Closed City

Inigo Thomas, 17 April 2025

Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City, released at the end of 1945. The movie begins with a version of the disclaimer that is now so common: ‘The characters in this film, even though they are inspired...

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We are so used to being photographed, at all times of day, in every stage and aspect of life, that it’s hard to imagine what it would be like to have your picture taken for the first time.  The apparent...

Read more about The Face You Put On: Victorian Snapshots

Regime Change in the West?

Perry Anderson, 3 April 2025

Where amid this turmoil does neoliberalism stand? In emergency conditions it has been forced to take measures – interventionist, statist and protectionist – that are anathema to its doctrine, yet without...

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Can we speak Greek? Martin Crusius’s Project

Alexander Bevilacqua, 3 April 2025

Crusius plundered contemporary travel accounts for information alongside chronicles and histories. He recognised the connections between Greeks and Ottomans, seeing them as part of a common tradition of...

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Hair-splitting: Versions of Marx

Peter E. Gordon, 3 April 2025

Marx meant Capital to read as if it were a pedagogical exercise in dispelling illusion, penetrating the veil that bourgeois economists had draped over a system that depends on the exploitation of labour...

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Worse than Orphans: Waifs and Strays

Mary Hannity, 3 April 2025

What power does a child have? You could refuse your food or try to run away or escape into your imagination. You could take out your unhappiness on the smaller ones or on yourself. Soares refers to the...

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This is the day! The Great Siege of Malta

Ferdinand Mount, 3 April 2025

‘Was it really the greatest siege?’ Catherine de Medici asked. ‘Greater even than Rhodes?’ ‘Yes, madame,’ the knight commander Antoine de La Roche answered, ‘greater even than Rhodes. It...

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I shoot, I shoot! D-Day and After

Daniel Lee, 3 April 2025

The binary of before and after a particular military event is often misleading when it comes to the experience of those who lived through it. For Jews and members of the Resistance, the days and weeks...

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Not Corrupt Enough: Whose Cold War?

Sheila Fitzpatrick, 20 March 2025

In American understanding, the Cold War was an ideological confrontation between freedom and democracy, on the one hand, and totalitarianism, on the other – a ‘war’, which implied that ultimately...

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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...

Read more about Why did he turn? Mario Vargas Llosa in Moscow

Dark Propensities: Opium Inc.

Nandini Das, 20 March 2025

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...

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Rob, Kill and Burn: Massacre in Damascus

Youssef Ben Ismail, 6 March 2025

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...

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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...

Read more about No More Corsets: Dressing the Revolution

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...

Read more about Thank God for Dynamite: Victor Serge in the Archives

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.

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What a spalage! Mis languages est bons

John Gallagher, 6 March 2025

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...

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The Time of the Whites: The Will to Colonise

Rahmane Idrissa, 20 February 2025

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...

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