In the mid-20th century the last airholes in the European pressure-vessel were sealed up, and the heat turned up high. Fortunately the vessel burst before it could reduce everything, all our cities, all...
A newly discovered short story, written in French in 1842 for Constantin Heger.
The OED suggests that the word ‘star’ was not used of ‘a person of brilliant reputation or talents’ until the 19th century. Nonetheless Sir Walter Ralegh (1554-1618)...
I can’t say that I’ve ever had a strong opinion – or any opinion – about Sean Penn. I may have watched a film he was in, and I booked but didn’t get as far as the...
The Soviet Union claimed leadership of the world revolution in the 1920s and 1930s – not surprisingly, since of all the European upheavals at the end of the First World War, theirs was the...
‘A man may find Naples or Palermo merely pretty,’ James Elroy Flecker, one-time British vice-consul in Beirut, wrote in October 1914, ‘but the deeper violet, the splendour and...
In the final episode of the TV series Joanna Lumley’s Nile, Joanna Lumley stretches out next to the muddy dribble that is apparently the furthest source of the White Nile, deep in the...
‘Nice story’, Freud says when Jung gives him an account of a patient’s pathology. The tone is amused, but a sense of shock lingers, an ironically disguised disapproval of...
Nuclear weapons have given rise to a multibillion-pound industry: the nonproliferation complex.
The history of the 13 mainland colonies, once a straightforward story of a settler population moving towards maturity, has become infinitely more complex.
Between 1845 and 1861 Victoria’s husband, Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, was largely responsible for setting the tone, pace and scope of the monarchy.
Why are our contemporaries so keen on buying and presumably reading the Iliad’s Iron Age reminiscence of Bronze Age combat?
As Manning Clark became a public figure, his work came to epitomise, in the eyes of his conservative critics, the ‘black armband’ school of history.
Andrea del Castagno was one of the greatest Florentine painters of the Quattrocento. But was he also a murderer?
Books about China, popular and scholarly, continue to pour off the presses. In this ever expanding literature, there is a subdivision that could be entitled ‘Under Western Eyes’. The...
Dotted around the world, there are still a few reminders of the fact that, between the 1880s and the First World War, Germany, like other major European powers, possessed an overseas colonial...
Edward Jones – the Burne came later – was born in Birmingham to a mother who died giving birth to him and a father who eked out a living as a frame-maker, although art, his son...
‘They’re not going to stop,’ Joe McCarthy said of the Communists. ‘It’s right here with us now. Unless we make sure there’s no infiltration of our government,...