For most of the last half-century, Britain has had two options: to be a whole-hearted member of Europe or to be a satellite of the United States. In this field there has been no ‘third...
At the end of a work comparing the first three Bourbon kings, the duc de Saint-Simon invites us to make a final judgment between them, and to be persuaded that the precise truth has guided every...
Anne and I step aside from the slow-motion procession of tourists walking among the market stalls of Florence in the roasting sunshine and enter the Baptistery, a compact octagonal church with...
Of all historical periods, modernity is the only one to designate itself, vacuously, in terms of its up-to-dateness. Does this imply that the Renaissance lagged behind the times, or that...
Recent interpretations of Medea have tended to focus on issues of gender and race, portraying her either as a feminist challenging Jason’s misogyny, or as a freedom fighter on behalf of the...
There is a general impression, both inside the country and abroad, that France is floundering in the face of its many political, social and economic problems – which is why winning the...
When Raphael Samuel died, the second volume of his projected trilogy Theatres of Memory was left unfinished. Some of the longer essays it was intended to contain were unwritten or unannotated or...
If Communism is only sketchily described, then post-Communism is simply unthinkable in Marx’s philosophy of history. So how can we make sense of his remarkable masterpiece in the 150th...
One does not get far in this book before one’s eye is stopped by the reproduction of an advertisement placed by B. Henderson, of the China Warehouse, Rye Lane, Peckham. Miss (or Mrs)...
For nearly a millennium, European states have been at war with one another. For as Hobbes observed, war consisteth not in Battell onely, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein...
This is the story of a goatherd who progressed through destitution and self-education to become the printer of the first edition of Calvin’s greatest work and one of the most respected...
Richard Evans hopes that this book will take the place of E.H. Carr’s What is History? and G.R. Elton’s The Practice of History as the ‘basic introduction’ to history as...
For most of us, rites of passage are chaotic family events, with crying babies, cranky children, bored teenagers, tipsy fathers and complaining grandmothers – an excuse for a party, a...
Organisms that contribute to the reproductive success of their species by doing things that decrease the size of their own brood appear to be inevitable losers in the Darwinian struggle. Since...
This useful, well-balanced and at times enthralling history of the Tate Gallery was commissioned for its centenary. It more or less coincides with the obsequies for the Gallery as we have known...
Five hundred and twenty million years ago, in the Cambrian sea, there swam and crawled a bizarre array of animals. There was Opabinia, which carried on its head a veritable cluster of eyes, not...
Back in the now remote summer of 1990, when we were still celebrating the birth of a ‘new Europe’, a book was published simultaneously in several European languages. Written by...
Studies of the Communist Party of Great Britain and its troubled history proliferate. An attraction for some must be that it is now safely dead and buried: there is no live bear to break out of...