Few people now remember that for many months after the First World War ended in November 1918 the blockade of Germany, where the population was already on the edge of starvation, was maintained...
What is ‘national history’, and what is it for? Who and what should be included in it? And where does it take place? For all that it may appear to offer a uniquely intelligible...
Operation Mincemeat was the key component of a British stratagem to persuade Germany in 1943 that the Allies in North Africa were about to invade Greece and Sardinia rather than Sicily. This...
Robert Ferguson’s title has already been used at least twice for Viking-related works, which makes one wonder about his subtitle: what’s ‘new’ in Viking studies? The...
On 22 November 1963, just over two hours after an assassin’s bullet killed President Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, the vice president, took the oath of office in a hastily improvised ceremony...
Raymond Chandler writes in ‘The Simple Art of Murder’ (1950) that ‘the English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull...
In 1959 the psychological doctrine known as ‘behaviourism’ was at the peak of its influence. Pioneered in the early 20th century by Edward Lee Thorndike, Clark Hull and J.B. Watson,...
When Chamberlain took the British to war in September 1939, he had little idea of how they would respond. Very few of those in authority did. In their introduction to this important collection of...
My grandmother Elsie couldn’t bear to look at photographs of Princess Diana. A pretty face was spoiled, she felt, by the thick streak of kohl along the bottom of Diana’s eyes. Odder...
My English teacher used to disparage Caroline Spurgeon. Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us was too systematic for the honest amateur with dottle in his ashtray, the sort who took...
On 30 January 1734 eight young men met for supper at the Golden Eagle Tavern in Suffolk Street near Charing Cross. They were a high-spirited, hard-drinking and well-connected group. One was an...
Those who discovered Salammbô at an impressionable age, before reading any conventional histories of the Punic Wars, know how difficult it is to shake off Flaubert’s intoxicating...
‘God created man.’ There are various ways you might read those words even without looking beyond the scriptures. Set them in the context of archaeology and a different reading...
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...
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...
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...
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’:...
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...