Sometimes armchair travel had to suffice; not all knowledge was worth dying for.
The clash between Harry Truman and General MacArthur represents not the resolution of a problem but a harbinger of problems to come.
Nobody knew what a good communist home ought to be like, Yuri Slezkine remarks, but on the basis of House of Government data it looks strikingly non-nuclear.
In 1661 Athanasius Kircher SJ made an archaeological discovery. He had gone to Tivoli, a town of villas and baths east of Rome, to restore his health and gather material for a book on the...
In a dawn raid on 24 April 1509, troops reporting to England’s new king, the 17-year-old Henry VIII, arrested two of his late father’s closest councillors and took them to the...
Where would you have found, in 1940, ‘the most elite university in the world in terms of the pool of scholars it contained’? The answer, according to the editors’...
Between 1910 and 1930, more than a million black Americans moved from the rural South to industrial cities north of the Mason-Dixon line. Refugees fleeing grinding poverty, political...
On inauguration day in January, the 45th president-elect of the United States arrived at the White House in a cavalcade of black cars, stepped from his armoured limousine, strode up the...
About 15 years ago, when I was renting my first flat in London, a man from the Office for National Statistics paid me a call. A letter had arrived a week earlier informing me that my postcode...
‘Many dentists,’ my mother once portentously remarked, ‘are thwarted sculptors.’ No doubt she herself had experienced their creative frustration – and painfully...
Two of the great 20th-century opponents of colonialism came from a tiny island in the Caribbean that never decolonised. Martinique – the birthplace of Aimé Césaire and Frantz...
Virgil’s Aeneid became the canonical myth of Rome’s origins as soon as it was published, following the poet’s death, in 19 BCE. When Troy fell to the Greeks, the story...
A diagnosis of mental illness has many meanings, not all of them clearly stated. It confines itself to the language of the clinic but its reach extends far beyond it. It confers many,...
In the early 1990s, the historian Gretchen Gerzina went to a London bookshop looking for a copy of Peter Fryer’s Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (1984). When she asked the shop...
James Hunter’s work has analysed with utter thoroughness the culture of the Highlands and the diaspora that was forced on it. In his latest book, Set Adrift upon the World, he...
We have arrived at this point because of an inveterate unwillingness on the part of Americans to look history in the face and a laser-like focus on that same history on the part of the leaders of North...
It’s nearly fifty years since Robert Kennedy was shot as he walked through the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. The date was 5 June 1968; and he had just won a narrow victory...
When woken in the night restless sleepers prayed and sewed and engaged in pillowtalk, as satirised in a text published in 1640 and entitled Ar’t asleepe husband? A boulster lecture, which opens with...