In 1517 a fierce commercial struggle broke out in England between two enterprising competitors in the busy trade of saving souls. The English Province of Austin Friars and Our Lady’s...
The monument at Montfaucon d’Argonne, near Verdun, commemorates the American advance that began in September 1918 and ended with the signing of the Armistice on 11 November. George...
Early on in Emmanuel Carrère’s remarkable novel The Kingdom (2014), about the vagaries of Christian conversion, the narrator tells us that his unhappy mother always knew of the...
Apart from witches, who come here to bury spells, few people visit the British North Gate cemetery in Baghdad. The witches believe that words written on paper and placed in the ground between...
The black man lynched for ‘standing around’ in a white neighbourhood in 1892 or the man lynched after being accused of vagrancy in Garyville, Louisiana in 1917 ought to remind us of Trayvon Martin,...
Capitalism is in crisis, again. Inequality, measured in wages, wealth distribution, employment, ‘affordable’ housing, has become the dominant framework for understanding the...
The title of the book is of course ironic: in spite of the clamour at the end of the Great War, the Kaiser was never tried, much less hanged. As Germany prepared to capitulate, Wilhelm II of...
The Middle East isn’t short of ruins (there are many more now than there were a few years ago), and until the turn of the millennium archaeologists believed that those at Khirbet...
The Aids crisis as it unfolded in America is an object lesson in the danger, the potential violence, inherent in organised prejudice. ‘I realise that rights for gays are not a big deal for most people...
If the suffrage movement didn’t change the party system, it did foster a specifically female genre of political performance.
Thomas Sankara, the revolutionary leader of Burkina Faso, was shot dead in the presidential buildings in Ouagadougou on 15 October 1987. I was the West Africa correspondent at the time for...
When the 25-year-old Ottoman prince Süleyman became sultan in 1520, his empire curled from Athens down to Mecca and tied the Red Sea to the Black. Selim, his father, had tended eastern...
Churchill’s Victorian oratory seemed unsuited to the microphone age, yet somehow it worked and survives still as a favourite British way to remember the war, so much so that it has its own dedicated...
A couple of years ago, a Russian television channel asked if they could interview me for a programme they were making about Hitler. I get these requests every so often, and agreed in the...
My eye falls on a blog headlined ‘Macron is restoring France’s dignity.’ What sort of polity is it that needs to have its dignity restored so frequently? Is not the quest for grandeur insisted on...
While approximately 80 per cent of the enslaved children born to white fathers in 18th and early 19th-century Jamaica remained in slavery, thousands of elite ‘coloured’ or ‘brown’ boys and girls...
It seems no more than a moment since the recent commemorations of May 1968 – fifty up – were superseded by the anniversary of the June Days in Paris in 1848. No celebrations or...
Lynda Nead’s new study of the ways in which postwar Britain was represented by what was not yet called its media is tirelessly oblique. She contrives to see everything through the...