In the mid-seventies, when the New Left in America was beginning to sense its impotence after the part it had played in bringing to an end the war in Vietnam, I was asked to give a talk at the...
This is the story of the Soviet Union’s most famous informer, one of the great hero-monsters of the century, and of the pressures which made it possible for a young boy in the North Urals...
The early railroads were rough maps of Victorian fancy. Trains and human hearts, in those days at least, were similar engines, chugging along on fresh steam or dank air. The Victorians cared...
Nothing proves a better test of historical difference than what we all have in common. Like us, the Victorians thought the death of the young more terrible than that of the old; they found sudden...
In his book about so-called pagan festivals, Ronald Hutton implies that if the ancient Britons had had electricity and central heating, maybe a greenhouse or two, they would have had no need for rituals....
In this supposedly scientific age, the imaginative side of the historical profession has undoubtedly been downgraded. The value of unreadable academic papers and of undigested research data is...
When the Allies gathered at Potsdam in July 1945 to organise the postwar world, it is unlikely that any of those taking part had ever heard of Vietnam. The actual name had been eliminated, the...
The principal city of Turkish Kurdistan is Diyarbakir, a bustling place that in the last fifty years has overflowed its magnificently forbidding basalt walls. These dramatic fortifications...
The ten thousand blacks in London in the 18th century had a visibility and presence completely out of proportion to their numbers. They featured in the prints of Hogarth, Cruikshank and Gillray;...
Know your enemy, and know yourself, and you may fight a hundred battles and not lose one. Sun Tzu, The Art of War, c.450 BC The historian William Manchester, who served with him in the Pacific,...
To contemporaries, the three Anglo-Dutch naval wars that were fought in the third quarter of the 17th century were epic encounters on which the fate of Europe depended: modern equivalents of...
For more than two thousand years, classical culture – as a set of institutions and as a way of life – has been lamenting its own imminent extinction. By inventing the idea of...
Summer 165 AD. I dreamed of Athena with her aegis, in the form of the statue in Athens made by Phidias, and just as massive and beautiful. The aegis, moreover, was giving off a perfume, as sweet...
In the 1640s, every musical household in Italy had a copy of ‘Ariadne’s Lament’, high-spot of Monteverdi’s Arianna and his most famous song. The lament expressed the...
‘I was only obeying orders.’ It is difficult to pronounce these words in English, except with a comic German accent. They symbolise for most people an unquestioning subordination to...
‘Poor in deeds and rich in thoughts’ – that was Friedrich Hölderlin’s lament about his fellow Germans two hundred years ago. In one form or another the idea became...
Towards the beginning of Event, Metaphor, Memory, Shahid Amin observes: ‘Indian schoolboys know of Chauri Chaura as that alliterative place name which flits through their history...
Every year, two and a half million people visit Westminster Abbey. Two-thirds of them, deterred no doubt by the combination of a tight tour schedule and the charge which is levied at this point,...