History & Classics

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,...

In the interwar years, the emerging concern of this group of young students was Britain’s inconsistencies: the combination of racism and domination with a seeming commitment to enabling the student’s...

In​ the late morning of 30 April 1980, I left my flat to walk across to the Iranian embassy on Princes Gate. As I walked, I didn’t at first notice that something odd was happening and that the police...

The German Peasants’ War was an expression of a novel political sensibility and has informed every major European insurrection since; it can’t be understood without considering the rebels’ inner...

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...

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...

In 1949 – as hostilities between Stalin and Truman escalated – 319 pairs of women were regularly exchanging letters between the US and USSR. The pen-pal programme had its origins in wartime Moscow....

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

‘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...

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...

In 1399, Henry IV had deposed his cousin Richard II, who died in custody soon afterwards. Richard’s rule was so loathed that the army Henry amassed didn’t have to fight a single battle. Nevertheless,...

The Holy Alliance presented itself as an intimate spiritual union between the souls and consciences of its signatories rather than a conventional treaty between sovereigns. It thereby encouraged contemporaries...

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...

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...