The history and historiography of Roman Britain abounds in paradoxes. The first and not the least of these is that one of the most obscure and geographically remote Roman provinces has attracted...
Whereas for Scotland national identity has been emphasised and preserved by formal governmental and legal structures, in Wales these have had to be created and have mostly not been permanent. Welshmen,...
In 1972, Routledge and Kegan Paul published The Victorian City: Images and Realities, edited by H.J. Dyos and Michael Wolff, a Wagnerian epic in which history went to town in exuberant, zestful...
Some weeks ago Sir Isaiah Berlin gave a broadcast in which he described his first visit to the legendary Russian poet Anna Akhmatova in Moscow in 1945 – a visit cut short in its prime by...
Two months after the suspension of Stormont in 1972, Belfast’s retiring Lord Mayor, Sir Joseph Cairns, delivered a farewell speech in which he reflected on the political situation. Ulster,...
The festschrift, a collection of essays in honour of a senior professor, used to be dismissed as a rather tiresome German habit. Now, I think, it has become embedded in English academic...
This book contains the memories of nine old people. Asked by a number of interviewers to talk about their childhoods in England before the First World War, they offer notes on families, schools...
This is the second collection of essays by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie to appear in English. The first was called The Territory of the Historian and up to a point justified its title by describing a...
This book is a history of the collective consciousness of the ‘Latin West’ (with this country and New England included by association or out of courtesy) during the last thousand...
It is natural to contrast this book with The Victorians and Ancient Greece, by Richard Jenkyns, reviewed by me in the issue of this journal for 21 August-3 September 1980 (Vol. 2, No 16). Mr...
In a storeroom at Sussex University lie the records of Mass-Observation, an organisation of anonymous people-watchers which in its heyday ran into much criticism. Some of its supporters made...
James Woodforde’s diary retains its lumbering, unremitting interest. The obvious question is: what made him keep it? To tell us about his times, or to tell his page about himself? These are...
Two years after the overthrow of Idi Amin in Uganda three governments have come and gone, and the fourth presides over a country whose British-created institutions are empty shells and where the...
Pandas are peculiar bears, which spend most of their days munching bamboo. To do this, they strip off the bamboo leaves by passing the stalks between their flexible thumb and the remaining...
In the late 1950s, when I went up to Oxford, one of the liveliest and most provocative lecturers in history was Lawrence Stone of Wadham. He was already a controversial figure who had, as we all...
Some great and some good things, and some both great and good, undoubtedly came out of the period 1640-60 which Christopher Hill calls ‘the English Revolution’. What came out,...
It is generally assumed that social revolutions must be good for the poor. To suggest the contrary is to appear wilfully paradoxical. After all, revolutionaries assert, and most of them probably...
Few historians have had their judgments as little challenged as Alexis de Tocqueville. When he pronounced that the French Revolution had its origins in the very society which it was destined to...