For ten years Horatio Bottomley had been an MP, for thirty he had fought his way through the court system without significant reverse. People stopped laughing at Bottomley’s jokes only when they grasped...
Brezhnev wasn’t a mediocrity. He was average: not at all the same thing. He was the sort of Russian male whom foreigners think typical: large, handsome, a great dancer brimming over with sentimental...
Elizabeth and Mary were obsessed with each other. Mary was the great-granddaughter of Henry VII; her paternal grandmother was Henry VIII’s older sister, Margaret Tudor. While most of Europe thought of...
Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley and Iris Murdoch all matriculated at Oxford in the late 1930s. When most of the men went off to war, they found themselves, as women philosophy students,...
Writing, loving, cleaning, flirting and screwing were all essential services. Of course, relationships between civilian women and soldiering men were rarely understood as war work. But the military was...
Tazmamart was a place of darkness and banishment: not only were inmates cut off from their families and lovers; they were exiles from history. Aziz BineBine recalls a couplet from ‘Recueillement’ in...
His many affairs, the rumours that he was his father’s nephew rather than son and his ignominious escape from a wartime assignation fill the pages of Plutarch’s biographical account, in which he pairs...
It was around 1977 that Prince Philip became aware that he was a god. It had happened three years earlier when the Britannia moored off the coast of Aneityum (in what is now Vanuatu). Jack Naiva, one of...
When people talked about ‘we’ or ‘us’, they didn’t mean me. And when I looked in the mirror, I saw it really was true – I looked completely different from the...
Saint Boniface used a manuscript to shield himself when attacked by robbers; the slashes it suffered make it a relic of his martyrdom. Pages of many books are marred by dirty fingerprints, wine stains...
England was certainly an oddity to her friends and enemies on the Continent. ‘There was no school in the world where one could learn how to negotiate with the English,’ the Spanish envoy Íñigo Vélez...
Ursula Kuczynski vowed to be better than her mother, an artist whose main talent was for self-regard. However, she found being a good parent harder than being a good communist, and when she had to choose...
Divine intervention was not claimed for the duel. At stake was the question of honour. A gentleman could have any number of differences with his peers without coming to blows, but when his honour was sullied...
George’s defenders cannot have it both ways. Either they take the king whole, hot and strong and stubborn to the last; or they have to sideline him as an endearing nullity. To present him as a great...
In 1638 Thomas Hobbes advised his aristocratic tutee Charles Cavendish ‘to avoid all offensive speech, not only open reviling but also that Satirical way of nipping’ that young noblemen were prone...
Gradual changes have already started to act as counterforces to the follies of unbridled speculation, fears of uncontrolled immigration and contagions of civil war. For Stella Ghervas, balance of power...
‘We won’t allow people to censor our past,’ Robert Jenrick, then communities secretary, said in January. ‘It is our privilege in this country to have inherited a deep,...
The territory of the USSR closely matched that of the imperial Russia of the tsars’ empire, with Russian still the lingua franca and a major Russian city its capital. It was natural to ask whether this...