Khodorkovsky in court in 2005 In Moscow, the second trial of the former oil and banking tycoons Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev has now been going on for nearly a year. The trial...
Some of the oldest laws in Britain were drafted in defence of the Atlantic salmon; one of the lesser-known clauses of the first Magna Carta in 1215 ordered the removal of all salmon weirs in...
Whatever sort of welcome the former Eighth Army driver Maurice Merritt was hoping for when he walked out of the Second World War and in through his front door, it probably wasn’t the note...
In Britain privilege still means power, but power no longer means class. The British ruling class is long since dead. Its day was over when neoliberal think tanks dethroned liberal-humanist...
Lucian of Samosata, nicknamed ‘blasphemer’ or ‘slanderer’ – better, in fact, to call him ‘atheist’, because in his dialogues he went so far as to...
A man of deep culture and reading in many languages, Edward Luttwak has at least three major personae – strategist, journalist and scholar. His practical experience of contemporary policy...
The history of Roman Britain has always been – perhaps predictably – more about Britain than about Rome. For those committed to our island story, the Romans, after all, are something...
A short time after the Russian prime minister P.A. Stolypin was assassinated in September 1911, Alexander Guchkov made a speech in the State Duma about the impact of revolutionary terrorism in...
Old posters romance journeys. The couple on deck watch the moon rise over a tropical sea. A castle on a rock fills the window of a train. A landscape unwinds before an open touring car that...
Anyone old enough to have made use of public phone booths on a regular basis will know that they were more often than not damp, cold, filthy and foul-smelling, and while amply supplied with the...
For seven days Paris was like a sinking ship, filling with water from above and below, as its inhabitants took to the lifeboats. On 24 January 1910 the Assembly met to vote an emergency budget for the...
The 20th anniversary of the Fall of the Wall was merrier than the tenth. In 1999, Berlin was in the middle of a hangover. The European Union was plagued by doubts about its future course; the...
When I die please bury me In a high-top Stetson hat, Put a 20-dollar gold piece on my watch-chain So the boys will know I died standing pat. ‘Saint James Infirmary’ A few years...
They had heard that we were great Philosophers, and expected much from us, one of the first questions that they askd was, when it would thunder. Joseph Banks, The ‘Endeavour’...
It has been history’s biggest birthday party. On or around 12 February 2009 alone – the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, ‘Darwin Day’ – there were more than 750 commemorative events...
When France fell in June 1940, a small remnant of the French army and navy found itself in England. Most of them chose to return to France, where their government was preparing to capitulate to...
In the afternoon of 23 April 1989, China’s highest-ranking official, the Party’s general secretary Zhao Ziyang, left from Beijing railway station for an official visit to North Korea....
As a graduate student in the 1970s, looking around for new approaches to history that would enable me to do something different from my teachers’ generation, I spent a lot of time with my...