The fantastical way of reading a myth, often more sheerly pleasurable, is usually discounted as childish make-believe. It has been most powerfully adopted by writers like Philip Pullman who are read principally...
By the 1780s, when the German writer Pierce von Campenhausen visited the Ottoman dependency of Moldavia, its capital, Iaşi, belonged to an Orient that would be familiar to readers of Edward...
On my morning commute through Edinburgh I pass a herbalist’s shop opposite the old medical school building. It was established in 1860. The windows are dressed at present with hand-made...
For various reasons, many of them neither literary nor trustworthy, Sappho has always exerted a magnetic yet frustrating attraction on later generations. The frustration is due in part to the...
‘What have the Romans ever done for us?’ John Cleese asks in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. His audience, not realising his question is rhetorical, replies: aqueducts,...
Wolfgang Schäuble can’t have expected an easy ride when he moved from Germany’s Interior Ministry to its Finance Ministry on 28 October 2009. Angela Merkel’s new...
The newspaper Action française habitually referred to Léon Blum, France’s Socialist leader, as the ‘warlike Hebrew’ and the ‘circumcised Narbonnais’...
On 25 July 1936, Hitler spent the evening at Bayreuth, attending a performance of Wagner’s Siegfried. On his way back to his guest quarters at Villa Wahnfried, the Wagner family...
When does weather begin? In the sense of detailed, day-to-day observations of light and temperature, the stuff of art and conversation, weather would seem to be a relatively late development....
The Watergate complex is a set of five buildings – three luxury apartment blocks, an office building and a hotel-office hybrid – built on the banks of the Potomac between 1963 and...
The word for ‘fox’ in medieval France was goupil – until a set of allegorical tales about a fox called Reynard became so popular that renard started to be used instead. The...
Alma Mahler Werfel celebrated her 70th birthday at home in Beverly Hills on the last day of August 1949. A brass band played as guests chose from a Mitteleuropean selection of drinks: champagne, black...
‘Splendid specimens of the untrousered, strong-legged Celt’. That was what John Stuart Blackie, the founder of Scotland’s first chair of Celtic studies in 1882, liked to see...
I have often thought of writing a history of own goals. It would try to identify the factors common to the great boomerangs of the past: the conceit that mistakes itself for cunning, the...
‘We wield bows and arrows, throw javelins and ride horses; we know nothing of woman-ly tasks,’ the Amazons said of themselves, according to Herodotus. He had learned the legends of...
Descriptions of Richard Titmuss often drew on the language of otherworldliness. He was ‘the high priest of the welfare state’ according to an assessment quoted in the ODNB. His...
Conceived in Moscow in 2005 as a film about the great Soviet physicist Lev Landau, Dau turned into something much stranger.
A friend who teaches in New York told me that the historian Peter Lake told him that J.G.A. Pocock told him that Conrad Russell told him that Bertrand Russell told him that Lord John...