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...
In the spring of 1604, the English were adjusting to the arrival of King James from Scotland, attending to the doings of his first Parliament, and awaiting the arrival of envoys from the King of...
In 1985, not long before he died of doctors in the hospital of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, the Russian astronomer Josef Shklovsky took his own pulse to save the doctor the trouble....
Will Rogers died in 1935 the most loved man in America. Ray Robinson, who was 14 years old, remembers the news reaching his summer camp by radio and spreading like wildfire from bungalow to...
We are moved but not overwrought at the fate of those who died at Pompeii, with the sinking of the Mary Rose, during the San Francisco earthquake and at the collapse of the Tay Bridge. We respond...
Historians prefer not to think about coincidence. It threatens their generalising if the resemblances between events are just accidental. Simon Szreter’s remarkable and very important book...
Swift has sailed into his rest; Savage indignation there Cannot lacerate his breast. So wrote Yeats of Swift’s Latin epitaph for himself in Dublin Cathedral, and it had been an epitaph...
When Richard Sorge was hanged in Sugamo prison in Tokyo, on 7 November 1944, I was still a student and I regret that I never had occasion to take a drink or three with that wit, charmer,...
Anti-feminist women puzzle and infuriate their feminist sisters. How can a capable and rational woman persuade herself to oppose a cause from which she has gained so much? Is it self-hatred, or...
It is easy to conjure up landscapes of the past peopled by holy fools, and to suppose that medieval times were full of simpleton jesters, and boy bishops leading rites of inversion and showing...
E.P. Thompson, historian and peacemaker, known as Edward to his friends, died at his home near Worcester in 1993. Four years on, Beyond the Frontier is a volume of material set aside far earlier....
There is not much left that cannot be done on two wheels. On the last page of this opulent book is a photograph of the Young Theatre of Riga performing Brecht’s Fear and Misery in the Third...
Dianne Sachko Macleod’s Art and the Victorian Middle Class opens up a new world: it answers some questions that have hitherto been asked in vain and others which we may not have thought of...