The Church shall not so expound one place of Scripture that it shall be repugnant to another. Of all the Thirty-Nine Articles, this is perhaps the most difficult, yet it lays down a scholarly...
It is better to arrive than to travel – these words are being written on a broken-down hovercraft, beached like a whale at Dover – and it was better still, before defiance of gravity...
Some passengers were playing cards in the second-class smoking-room when the Titanic hit the iceberg. It was Sunday night, quite late, and most people had gone to bed. One card-player had seen...
Most recent books in English on Argentine history are on economic history. On looking them over, readers who are not economic historians will probably reach the same conclusion as did J.O.P....
These well-worn lines of Kipling’s encapsulate an enduring feature of the popular English concept of national history – its cosiness. Because of the remarkable quantity and quality of...
The class reunion – the gathering of a given year of graduates at their high school or college – is a Big American Event, and the biggest, most elaborate class reunion is the...
For the past thirty years Gertrude Himmelfarb has sounded a discordant and unusual note among writers on Victorian England. She defended a (small c) ‘conservative’ perspective long...
Hans-Georg Gadamer ranks as one of Germany’s foremost philosophers. He occupied a chair at Heidelberg for quarter of a century, during which time his lecturing skills and a steady flow of...
‘Aristotle and Plato’, ‘Plato and Aristotle’ – the coupling of names is something we take for granted. They are the two giants of ancient philosophy, are they not,...
It is very fitting that a book dealing largely with the various ways in which the human life-span has been neatly divided into ‘ages’ should itself have an elegant and symmetrical...
I have been reading the Twentieth Century’s special number on women, which is pink with a palely gleaming Mona Lisa on its cover. It’s odd that I’ve not read it before, since it...
As the bombs go off in Belfast, London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Madrid, New Delhi, Beirut or wherever and the police start shooting ordinary citizens in order to preserve the peace, the television...
These five books represent something of a cross-section of current work on Tudor and Stuart English history, and they give a picture of how fundamentally the agenda for discussion in this field...
Here are two books about the relationship of the English to their past. According to Patrick Wright, England is a reactionary society burdened by a false mystique of national identity. To...
‘I adore war,’ Julian Grenfell reported to his mother from the Flemish trenches in 1914, in a letter which she proudly sent on for anonymous publication in the Times. Stalking Germans...
In 1909 there appeared a small book by Montgomery Carmichael modestly entitled Francia’s Masterpiece and dedicated to reconstructing the content, purpose and original setting of a single...
‘It angers me to pass a grocer’s shop,’ declares the impeccably fogeyish hero of Gissing’s The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903), ‘and see in the window a...
An interesting moment has been reached in de Gaulle studies. That the traditional approach has by no means been exhausted is shown by the biography by Don Cook, a journalist on the Los Angeles...