Delphi offers one of the most extraordinary, paradoxical and, for many rationalists, embarrassing success stories from ancient Hellas. It was the centre, the omphalos, or navel, of the...
In 2007 France’s leading Slavist, Georges Nivat, following the example of Pierre Nora’s Lieux de mémoire, published a similar survey of Russia, Les Sites de la mémoire...
John Donne is a modern rediscovery. His reputation, high among his contemporaries, fell after their time, along with those of other 17th-century metaphysical poets who would wait equally long...
The Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus liked to look on the bright side. True, that hasn’t been the usual assessment: his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) was intended to drench the...
Shortly after ten o’clock on the morning of Friday, 31 July 1914, less than an hour before trading was scheduled to begin, the London Stock Exchange closed its doors to business for the...
An inquest jury reached a verdict in Peach’s case of death by misadventure, but the jurors had not been given access to all the relevant information.
The Third Reich was founded on a conspiracy theory.
Empress Dowager Cixi of the Qing dynasty is one of those historical figures who are renovated from time to time as the moment demands. In the first decade of the 20th century, she was either...
When, as a vaguely anti-authoritarian ex-service undergraduate, I first studied Herodotus seriously in the years immediately following the Second World War, my overriding impression was of a man...
Vikings are here again, thanks to the British Museum’s Vikings: Life and Legend (until 22 June). The problem for the exhibition’s organisers – and for Philip Parker, whose book
Arch Getty spent a great many hours in Soviet libraries and archives (presumably during the 1980s), trying to understand Stalinism, studying its institutions and formal procedures, reading...
In 1836, Benjamin Shaw looked back on a life of toil in the textile factories of the North-East. He was a skilled worker, but had lived in poverty for years, buried his wife and four of his...
Anglophone ancient historians have never had much time for Marx. They tie themselves in knots to avoid class-based analyses, recasting what can look an awful lot like class in terms of...
The pejorative associations of the term ‘coalition’ are deep-rooted in British politics.
In the most ancient stories of the Flood the gods are annoyed by humans making a racket and keeping them up at all hours.
The first thing to know about this big book is that it’s not really about the ‘massacre in Malaya’, the crime the media sometimes call ‘Britain’s My Lai’....
One of the ways in which literary texts are capacious is their ability to contain, within themselves, imaginary books: books that the more literal-minded real world isn’t yet able to...
I hadn’t been in Oviedo for long before I saw the anarchists’ red and black flags. Fifty people stood outside the train station in the midday sun, protesting against the imminent...