David Hume once remarked that the English had the least national character of any people in the universe. Perhaps this was a cunning Scottish put-down, since character is just what the English...
Ground motions from the earthquake in Abruzzo, more than 100 kilometres away, woke my neighbours in their beds, though I managed to snore my way through it all. I live in a flat on the top floor...
Young men who join gangs are participating in an alternative system of social cohesion. Each gang upholds its collective will through a range of penalties which include death, torture and...
Colin Kidd’s study of Scottish Unionism goes, as he himself insists, sternly against the prevailing ideological current, which is focused on the emergence of political nationalism in both...
On 22 February 1854, James Buchanan, then the American ambassador in London but soon to be president of the US, celebrated George Washington’s birthday with a dinner to which Giuseppe...
The winter of 1947 was Europe’s coldest since 1880. In Britain, a fuel shortage effectively halted industrial production for three weeks and led to a sixfold increase in unemployment. In...
In a diary entry for 11 August 1936, the German writer and journalist Friedrich Percyval Reck-Malleczewen recalled his first meeting with Adolf Hitler. It was in 1920, at the Munich home of his...
Pinzolo is a sleepy Alpine resort in northern Italy, about an hour’s drive from Trento. Today, it is a prosperous place, living off winter and summer tourism, but for most of the last...
The practice of recent American presidents, in absolving criminal defendants and suspects from the penal consequences of their offending and remitting sentences, has been viewed by many British...
‘Once the United States is in Cuba, who will drive them out?’ José Martí, the father of Cuban independence, asked from his New York exile in 1889. Six years later, as...
The Foreign Legion is in the doghouse again, as it is from time to time in France. The scandal turns on a 25-year-old Slovakian, Jozef Svarusko, who died of heart failure in Djibouti last year,...
You can’t just march into someone else’s country, give it entirely arbitrary boundaries, decide to rule it with only the minimum of resources, settle an alien population on its best...
The word excentricité was first used in its figurative sense by Germaine de Staël in her Considérations sur les principaux événements de la Révolution...
Now King David was old and stricken in years; and they covered him with clothes, but he gat no heat. Wherefore his servants said unto him, Let there be sought for my lord the king a young...
The stretch of water known as San Francisco Bay was transformed in the 1930s. No one intended this, but the bay, famous for rapid shifts in weather, light and mood, became a kind of stage set for...
Inspired provocateurs during May 1968 in Paris, the Situationists are now the stuff of legend: one of those rare avant-gardes whose art and politics were not only radical but also forged together...
It is not only the most familiar date in English history, it also marks in many minds, even educated ones, the start of it. Before 1066 there were just those tedious Anglo-Saxons, whose public...
The Second World War was fought both over and inside every cinema in Europe. In 1941 Joseph Goebbels declared that one of his key goals was ‘to establish German film as the dominant...