After the Second World War was over, 220,000 cards were distributed among French citizens to attest that their bearers had been Voluntary Resistance Fighters. Yet André Malraux, talking to...
The Seventh Psalm is required in the Book of Common Prayer to be sung or said, in Miles Coverdale’s version, on the evening of Day One of the Church’s calendar: God is a righteous...
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, founder of Theosophy, kept in her New York apartment in the 1870s a stuffed baboon with a copy of The Origin of Species under its arm, along with a platonically...
In his brilliant account of collapsing Yugoslavia, A Paper House, Mark Thompson meets a leader of the Vojvodina Ruthenes called Professor Julijan Tamas. Since 1989 this tiny people has been...
Ancient religion has attracted some outrageous scholarship. And women’s religion in the ancient world – from cave people to the early Christians – has been blessed with far more...
Who better to be our guide to modern Cambridge than the Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History? Christopher Brooke was brought up in Cambridge, the son of the professor of medieval history and...
Most of world history until the later 18th century could be written without more than marginal reference to the Jews, except as a small people which pioneered the monotheistic world religions, a...
The blurb says that Eunice Lipton is ‘a distinguished art historian’, but don’t be misled by that or by the alluring reproduction of Manet’s Olympia (head and neck only)...
In a notebook entry written during the summer of 1743, the English engraver George Vertue paid tribute to his friend the ‘ingenious’ William Taverner, who ‘besides his practice...
The creation of identity, the invention and re-invention of the self, is as emblematic of the modern era as technological invention. Of the many revolutions our species has witnessed in the last...
Four angels held back the winds of destruction. Until the redeemed had received the seal of the living God, nothing could be harmed. But now the servants of God are sealed, and the seventh seal...
Tasmania’s prodigal son, Peter Conrad, suggested recently that his island-state had ‘unwritten its own history’ in accordance with ‘a self-protective incuriosity about...
Food, like sex, is mostly in the head. Or, if that seems exaggerated, what about the thought that thinking about food is the modern growth industry? Restaurants, supermarkets, the media –...
In 1989, François Furet was frequently hailed (or criticised, depending on the context) as the ‘king’ of the Bicentenary of the French Revolution. He seemed to be everywhere,...
The late Lord Caccia, who had the misfortune to arrive in Washington as British Ambassador in November 1956 just as the ‘special relationship’ hit its all-time low with the abrupt...
For a few years in the mid-Seventies I lived in Tanzania, my husband being at the time one of the horde of expatriate ‘advisers’ who flocked there hoping to be of service to...
No question: the cold simplicity of vodka is an invitation to toss the 100 grams down the back of the throat and then to wait, with eyes watering, for the lovely atomic spread in the gut as the liquor...
‘I will never, come hell or high water, let our distinctive British identity be lost in a federal Europe.’ John Major’s ringing assurance to last year’s Conservative Party...