At the turn of the 20th century, the Swiss were plagued by strange, interlinked medical conditions, which existed elsewhere to a degree, but in Switzerland were endemic in more than 80 per cent of the...
Ultimately, the companies responsible for producing and distributing infected blood products paid more than a billion dollars in compensation worldwide, but most victims never got a penny.
The brutality of Hamas’s attack shattered Israel’s definition of itself as a post-Holocaust sanctuary that guarantees protection for the Jewish people inside and outside its boundaries. Israel’s...
Pleasure is supposedly more valuable today than it will be tomorrow; deferral has a cost. But to the canonists, unlike the capitalists, this made no sense. Time wasn’t something that could be bought...
In contrast to feudal society, where everyone, lord or serf, remained rooted to the land, and words were ‘passed on from generation to generation’, life in the democratic age was unmoored, indeterminate,...
‘Little Boy’ exploded over Hiroshima at 8.15 a.m. on 6 August 1945, wiping most of the city off the face of the earth and killing eighty thousand people instantly. But the ‘shock’ to the leadership...
Leaflet drops informed people that because of the actions their leaders had taken, or because there were insurgents hiding among them, they should immediately leave a proscribed area. Continuous air strikes...
London was a city that loved to snack: a Venetian visitor wrote in 1618 that ‘between meals one sees men, women and children always munching through the streets, like so many goats.’ But while buying...
To call him a ‘great republican’ doesn’t mean much nowadays and downplays his radicalism. Nonetheless, like de Gaulle, he is an undisputed national figure whose legend is apparently sacrosanct, if...
However the conflict ends, with or without Hamas in power (and I bet on the former), Israel won’t be able to avoid negotiating over the exchange of prisoners. For Hamas, the starting point will be the...
Before the strike, the country was characterised by comparative egalitarianism, the (relative) power and legitimacy of organised labour, and an industrial economy in which state industries played a prominent...
Eleanor of Aquitaine was like the folkloric figure of Mélusine, woman above and fish or serpent from the waist down, though she normally managed to conceal that trait.
On a personal level, the kinds of thing we laugh at reveal the truth about us as individuals. On a national level, the kinds of thing we laugh at reveal the truth about us as a country. This seems to apply...
‘When women are marginalised, enslaved and silenced, very few men will be capable of any form of kindness,’ Emily Wilson remarks. It is no small thing for Homer to have noticed.
The question of the Roma’s origins became more significant as the medieval social order gave way to modernising, territorially defined states. Individuals were no longer simply assigned a place in a...
Only when a dictatorship actually attacked the Church and distanced itself from Christianity did it alienate the papacy, but even the actions of Hitler’s Germany in this direction were insufficient to...
‘Medieval people’, Gillian Adler and Paul Strohm write, were ‘more keenly aware of simultaneous and contending temporalities than we are, and more skilled at entertaining a wider range of temporal...
Questions about the kinds of word that were and were not suitable for inclusion were a perennial source of conflict between James Murray and the volunteers who had professional status in a particular field....