It becomes apparent from Owen’s graphic and appalled letters home that it was the urge to make his mother, in the first instance, see and feel what the Western Front was really like that drove him to...
In the guise of natural theology, Malthusian political economy soon became the common sense of a middle class brought up to see the world as fallen and life as a trial: scarcity was ordained by providence,...
Fanon’s world has a logic. His pages are full of identities, contradictions, Aufhebungen – master and slave, being and nothingness. Any biography, however, has to decide in the end which of the various...
Accounts of Elizabeth’s ‘nomination’ and James’s straightforward succession are ultimately misleading. Elizabeth’s refusal to make a will or leave directions for her funeral reinforces the impression...
One of the papyri excavated by the archaeologist Heba Adly contains 97 lines of two plays by Euripides – Ino and Polyidus – that were known to us only through scattered quotations and summaries...
Despite an explicit biblical prohibition on cross-dressing, reinforced by canon law, trans monks caught the imaginations of worshippers because they so fully embodied the ideal of ‘becoming male’,...
The department store is dying. It’s not the only building type to find itself marooned by social and economic change, but it is the youngest. Castles and churches, stately homes, factories and warehouses...
The wealth of India had been a legend in the Mediterranean since the fourth century BC, enhanced by Alexander the Great’s forays. India, not China, was Rome’s greatest trading partner. The sea was,...
Everywhere, it seems, human beings have believed that sexual desire must be curbed – it is ‘a source of conflict’, Maurice Godelier says, and ‘cannot be entirely left up to each individual’.
In July 2020 I drove through Lynch for the first time. Many buildings had been abandoned and boarded up. A rusted chute sloped down from the top of a concrete silo and disappeared into shrubs on the other...
Velázquez’s portraits give us a more penetrating understanding of the image that the Spanish monarchy wished to convey than any textual description supplied by accounts or pamphlets. The portraits reveal...
The descriptions of Nato by US leaders have often had little to do with the defence of Europe and a lot to do with Nato as a strategic asset to the US. In 1948 the US Army General Staff prepared a memorandum...
It was a ‘decade of heroes’, as E.P. Thompson put it. ‘There were Guevaras in every street and in every wood.’ Popular Front coalitions won power in France, Spain and Chile, and sympathisers with...
The story begins in 324 CE, when the emperor Constantine broke ground for a new city on the Bosphorus, on the site of the ancient polis of Byzantion. Notwithstanding later legend, this was not a Christian...
Fools – men and women from incongruous, humble backgrounds – were dropped into the grand settings of Whitehall or Hampton Court to see what would happen. Their ‘naturalness’, or ignorance of convention...
The French Revolution soon turned into a rout of women’s rights. In 1804, the Napoleonic Code reaffirmed a husband’s authority over his wife and the Bourbon Restoration rescinded the right to divorce...
Myths that sought to explain American history and chart a path to the future once helped to bind the country together. Today, they are absorbed into the culture wars, reflecting divergent understandings...
Adorno’s aesthetics are extreme. ‘He is an easy man to caricature,’ Ben Watson writes, ‘because he believed in exaggeration as a means of telling the truth.’ He is frequently, and rightly, upbraided...