Leaf through the pages of almost any life sciences journal, and you will come across advertisements for HeLa cells, living laboratory tools that have formed the basis of an incalculably vast...

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How to Defect: North Korea

Isabel Hilton, 10 June 2010

Our father, we have nothing to envy in the world, Our house is within the embrace of the Workers’ Party. We are all brothers and sisters. Even if a sea of fire comes toward us, sweet...

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Overstatements: Anti-Semitism

Diarmaid MacCulloch, 10 June 2010

The leprous spawn of scattered Israel Spreads its contagion in your English blood; Teeming corruption rises like a flood Whose fountain swelters in the womb of hell. Your Jew-kept politicians buy...

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In 1834 a spectacular fire destroyed the House of Commons. No one was sorry. More than 60 years later Gladstone still remembered the building’s lack of ‘corporeal conveniences’:...

Read more about High Taxes, Bad Times: Late Georgian Westminster

For Tony Judt What is a collective passion? And is it something we should want, or get excited about? Today the political climate across the Western world is marked, we are told, by a curious...

Read more about ‘J’accuse’: Dreyfus in Our Times: A Lecture

Sex Sex Sex: Charles II

Mark Kishlansky, 27 May 2010

Harry Widener went down on the Titanic at the age of 27. He was the scion of a wealthy Philadelphia family whose patriarch began life as a street vendor and ended it as one of the richest men in...

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Evil Just Is: The Italian Inquisition

Diarmaid MacCulloch, 13 May 2010

This is one of Christopher Black’s verdicts on the work of the Roman Inquisition: The human casualties among major thinkers were fewer than might have been expected; Bruno might have been...

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A City of Sand and Puddles: Paris

Julian Barnes, 22 April 2010

Like many Francophiles, I’ve never read a book about Paris. Not a whole one, all the way through, anyway. Of course, I’ve bought enough of them, of every sort, and in some cases the...

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The Old Man: Trotsky

Sheila Fitzpatrick, 22 April 2010

When Isaac Deutscher was writing his great three-volume biography in the 1950s, Leon Trotsky was a name to conjure with. The first volume came out in 1954, a year after Stalin’s death and...

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Butcher Boy: Mithridates

Michael Kulikowski, 22 April 2010

To cheat one’s enemy of victory can be a victory in itself, at least when any hope of actually winning a war has disappeared. So it was with one of Rome’s most flamboyant enemies,...

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Poker Face: Palmiro Togliatti

Eric Hobsbawm, 8 April 2010

The history of the 20th-century Communist movements that never acquired state power has been overshadowed by the extraordinary story of the rise and fall or self-transformation of the regimes...

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Diary: Wiltshire Baptists

Alison Light, 8 April 2010

The village of Shrewton lies in the valley of the River Till, overshadowed by chalk escarpments, about four miles from Stonehenge. One of my ancestors, Charles Light, was the pastor of the Zion...

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Into Your Enemy’s Stomach: Louis IX

Alexander Murray, 8 April 2010

Can a political leader be a saint? Private morality can’t be the sole criterion. Politicians have to make decisions in a cruel and perplexing world, and some consequences of even the best...

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My dear, because you were only 15 years old the week we were married, you asked that I be indulgent about your youth and inexperience until you had seen and learned more. You expressly promised...

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Don’t Look Down: Dull Britannia

Nicholas Spice, 8 April 2010

In 1954, at the trial of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu for homosexuality, the counsel for the prosecution, G.D. ‘Khaki’ Roberts (‘fruity-voiced, with a bottle of bright pink cough...

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In February 1938, R. G. Collingwood, then Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford and aged only 48, suffered a small stroke. It was the first of a series, each one more serious...

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Our Supersubstantial Bread: God’s Plot

Frank Kermode, 25 March 2010

Eamon Duffy, whose opinion of this book will not be lightly disputed, remarks on its jacket that ‘everyone who reads it will learn things they didn’t know.’ Most lay reviewers...

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There is no doubt an art of political slander, as Robert Darnton terms it, and in many places something like what Charles Walton calls a ‘culture of calumny’. But in what ways are...

Read more about A Touchy Lot: Libelling for a Living