As someone once said, although we do not know exactly when, time is of the essence. It can be given or taken, saved or spent, borrowed or beaten, kept or killed. There are old timers and egg timers, time...
The history of women has become a lucrative subject. No historical topic offers a better hope of publishers’ contracts, or even, in the United States at least, of academic appointments. Yet...
Twenty-odd years ago I was lucky enough to hear the great Jeannie Robertson, then at the height of her powers as a singer in Scots of anything from ‘classic’ ballads to sheer bawdy....
For many people in this country the garish Texan settings of television serials, with their incessant boorishness, brutality and violence, appear to represent ‘normal’ life in...
Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609) was a towering figure in the history of European scholarship. During the first half of his career, he virtually created the systematic study of early Latin; during the...
It takes a true patriot to love Roman Britain: all those water-filled ditches, and nothing at the bottom but a few centuries of provincial tat. Boots and bricks survive, but little that is...
Dr Palliser’s The Age of Elizabeth is the latest volume in a series which seeks to relate English and British economic and social history from the Anglo-Saxons to the Welfare State. Its...
I am beginning to recover from the effects of being knocked down in Old Compton Street by a motor-car. Now I can walk to the end of the road. The other day I made an excursion as far as Camden...
Between 22 June 1941 and 9 May 1945 the Red Army of Workers and Peasants disposed of ten million German troops, destroyed over six hundred enemy divisions, liberated all of Eastern Europe and...
This is the first volume to appear in the ‘Fontana History of Modern France’, edited by Douglas Johnson, which will eventually cover the period from the Ancien Régime to the...
T here is little in common between these two books save that they are both written by enthusiasts, and that they both extend the reader’s vocabulary. One book is by a man of the West...
It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature. Henry James, Life of Hawthorne But, first of all, is there...
I buy coffee about once a month. This involves an elaborate pilgrimage. First I take a bus almost to Piccadilly Circus, a pilgrimage in itself. Then I find my way by back streets to the head of...
Science is practised amid folklore and ideology, and it is foolishly romantic to imagine that the scientist conducts his professional affairs on a high plateau of reason untainted by the miasmous...
In the mountainous district of Friuli in Northern Italy there were good witches and bad, ‘good walkers’ (benandanti) and evil ones. On certain nights of the year during the Ember...
Time was when Clio had a seamless garment: but that was before the division of labour set in. Prefixless history is now condescendingly thought of as ‘straight’ history and her...
Those Greeks who grew up in the Civil War knew there was an enemy – but didn’t know who the enemy was or where he would come from. The memory, from my own childhood in Salonica, of my...
In the Edwardian age the clerical collar was still worn in the Turl but that was merely a survival. The don was, to adapt an American movie conceit, a ‘watermelon man’, one colour...