‘Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?’ Adolf Hitler asked his generals in 1939, as he told them to ‘close your hearts to pity,’ ‘act...
Bruce Sterling’s 1998 political thriller, Distraction, is set in the year 2044, and roving bands of land-based pirates have taken over the American hinterlands, swamps and roadways, armed...
In 1779, a Scottish doctor called William Alexander published a two-volume History of Women. Alexander was a man of the Enlightenment who regarded politeness to women as a mark of civilisation....
A voyeuristic pleasure in being privy to secrets drives many archival historians. After ploughing through bundles of faded letters reporting on wills and the weather, pigs and piles, what...
On 15 September, the eve of Mexico’s bicentenary, President Felipe Calderón threw the country a $3 billion birthday party. An hour before midnight, he took the tricoloured flag from...
Nowadays, when Palestinian activists in their twenties and thirties meet up with veterans of the Palestinian struggle, they show an unexpected thoughtfulness towards the older, revolutionary...
Alfred Hitchcock’s Rich and Strange (1931) includes a quietly compelling scene set on a Tube train packed with office-weary commuters. The dim and sluggish hero finds himself standing next...
Cherished for centuries as the great bulwark of British liberty, the remedy of habeas corpus has in recent years lost much of its practical importance. Experienced judges may retire without ever...
Some 25 years after Alsace had been returned to France at the end of the Second World War, I took an opportunity to work there for a few months, in the belief that it would improve my French. A...
In May 1977, Ian Paisley was in a television studio in Belfast when he bumped into Malachy McGurran, a leader of the Official IRA in Northern Ireland. At that time, Paisley was attempting to...
Ever since Mephistopheles summoned a devil to delude Faust into believing that Helen of Troy stood before him and would make him immortal with a kiss, there has been something fugitive about her; for Laurie...
In the early 1800s, nearly 25 per cent of all females in the United Kingdom were called Mary. If you add to these many Marys the crushing numbers of Elizabeths, Sarahs, Janes and variform Anns...
For more than three decades, the makers of American opinion have evaded the full significance of the Vietnam War – the mendacity, the brutality, the futility. The collective amnesia has...
In 1979, shortly after the signing of the peace treaty between their two countries, President Navon of Israel presented President Sadat of Egypt with a copy of The Guide for the Perplexed,...
HUAC: Is your brother a member of the Communist Party? Robert Oppenheimer: He is not a member of the Communist Party, to the best of my knowledge. HUAC: Are you speaking as of the present...
Seven years after his death, Hugh Trevor-Roper’s reputation is still a cauldron of discord. He would have enjoyed that. Steaming in the mix are the resentments of those he expertly wounded,...
Early on in this book there is a photograph of the British architect Peter Cook’s living-room ‘circa 1970’. Cook is now Sir Peter, co-designer of the rather bland main stadium...
Cut-paper work from 1707 by the 17-year-old Anna Maria Garthwaite, who later became a designer of patterned silks for dresses In contrast to the still contentment of a Zoffany conversation...