There often seems to be a connection between the style of an art historian or critic and that of his or her favourite artist. Reading Tim Clark on Courbet, it is easy to see the reasons why the...
Most of us grew up – or were born – during the Cold War. We were formed by a quite extraordinary period, by events which did not take place rather then events which did. We never...
‘A family on the throne,’ observed Walter Bagehot, in one of those honeyed phrases which may mean more or less than they seem to, ‘is an interesting idea.’ Indeed, it is....
The lengths to which people have gone to eradicate snakes are remarkable. A century ago, for example, a prolonged campaign was mounted against timber rattlesnakes in the north-eastern United...
I have been thinking about Responsibility ever since visiting Mogadiscio last year: the householder’s responsibility to the household, that of the smaller community to the larger, of the...
The years between the death of Queen Victoria and the beginning of the First World War seem now to have been leisure’s golden age. Recalling the summers of 1913-14, Osbert Sitwell noted...
Three and a half hours into the auction at the Westbury Hotel in London earlier this year, Jason Chapman is smoking Old Holborn rolled in liquorice paper. In the inside left pocket of his blazer...
‘He made money by selling his country; he went around spending it on prostitutes and fish.’ So Demosthenes vilified a political opponent, as publicly corrupt and privately depraved....
‘Never, even in the Thames,’ a British traveller to Kronstadt wrote in the early 19th century, did I observe a more extensive or denser forest of masts. It was gratifying to find...
‘Without the discovery of America,’ Flaubert noted in the Dictionnaire des idées reçues, ‘we would have neither syphilis nor phylloxera.’ Both imports were...
The Martiniquan poet and ideologue of négritude, Aimé Césaire, celebrated the sons and daughters of Africa as Ceux qui n’ont inventé ni la poudre ni la boussole...
The eighth wonder of the world was closed. The attendant told us that this was due to the theft of a sacred artefact from one of the churches. ‘By a tourist,’ he said with feeling. We...
Each generation fashions its own image of Richard II. To his contemporaries, Richard’s fate was an admonitory instance of changing fortune: the King fell in the midst of his glory and was...
Richard Cobb, who died last year at the age of 79, began his career as a historian of Revolutionary France. When I first met him, in 1968, he was widely thought to be able to write only in...
Two thousand seven hundred and thirty years ago, somewhere on the west coast of Turkey, not far perhaps from Izmir, you are attending a feast. Although some of your neighbours are still noisily...
By 1945, a quarter of the aeroplanes visible on Japanese military airfields were dummies. Despite a Goon Show suggestion to the contrary, the Allied air forces did not respond by dropping dummy...
Oh those awful Serbs! Until recently no one cared or knew much about them in the West and now almost everyone has an opinion about them and it’s most likely to be unfavourable. Karadzic and...
Eighteen months ago Cambridge University Press shocked the publishing and academic worlds by pulling Anastasia Karakasidou’s book from their list. They claimed that publication could...