On the outskirts of most Indian cities you still encounter the war graves of imperialism: the melancholy, unvisited Christian cemeteries which contain the serried ranks of monuments commemorating...
Rose was my next-door-neighbour-but-one when I lived in the furthermost reaches of Camden – three steps and one foot off the pavement and I was alienated in Islington. Rose was in her...
‘The poorest he that is in England has a life to live as the greatest he.’ This assertion by Colonel Thomas Rainborowe in November 1647 seems almost a cliché, as much part of...
When Pasolini, disgusted with the fatted values of post-war capitalism in Italy, was dreaming up an alternative in his late Trilogy, he found the imagery he needed in old collections of stories,...
In 1947, the Allied Control Commission pronounced the death of Prussia, symbol of militarism and knee-jerk obedience, and alleged progenitor of Nazism. It has stayed dead. The GDR was never, as...
The newspapers covering the trial in 1895 found it difficult to put the hideous words into print. Most hoped that those who needed to know would know enough already. Others assumed that a lacuna...
In the élite minority arts of the 20th century, the US component is one of many, and by no means the most important. On the other hand, it penetrates, indeed dominates, the popular culture...
David Selbourne’s The Principle of Duty is described on the dust-jacket as ‘the most comprehensive theory of civic society written in English since Locke’. ‘In...
All my lifetime, until very recently, conventional wisdom has had it that there was something very peculiar about the ‘Victorian’ era. Since about 1910, its values and practices have...
The man of the year in 1909 was Louis Blériot, in whom I have a personal interest, since I was a five-month foetus at the time of his cross-Channel flight. Notoriously, this exploit showed...
It is no new thing for British historians to write knowledgeably about American history. They were at work by the early 18th century, wrote significant histories (mainly Tory) of the American...
Hell is not just God’s vengeance on humanity, nor is it only, in Sartre’s sardonic phrase, other people. To be sure, it can be the tortured, persecutory visions of a few psychotic...
During the 18th century it was considered an edifying entertainment to trace the stuff of which the finery in the smartest London shops was composed to its distant origins: whalebone from the...
Like some garrulous character in a story by Italo Calvino, an Italian physician tells of his meeting at a 16th-century siege with a Spaniard who had just lost his nose in a barrack-room brawl....
It must be many years since any girl spoke of going into service. The language of labour has changed. Farm workers are now described as full-time agricultural technicians; kitchen maids have...
I could give you the names of three captains now ’oo ought to be in an asylum, but you don’t find me interferin’ with the mentally afflicted till they begin to lay about them...
The Indians attacked in the dead of winter, before dawn. The first the minister knew of it was the sound of axes breaking open his windows and doors. Moments later, twenty painted savages were in...
Sometime in the late autumn of 1977, I went to a book party that was held in the Rosebery Room of the House of Lords. Why I went I can’t think – the volume was some piece of unreadable...