In the year 8 AD, at the age of 50, Publius Ovidius Naso stood at the height of poetic ambition. Fêted and continuously successful for almost thirty years, Ovid had been without a rival...
In the 1660s, repression gave way to liberation. Samuel Pepys took great pleasure from his debauching of the progeny of such well-known Puritans as ‘Penny’ Penington, whose...
‘Live your myth in Greece,’ the Greek National Tourism Office urges us. This summer’s posters feature a young couple, children running along the beach behind them, while an...
A multi-volume Anthology of Huntingdonshire Cabmen (‘sure to be the standard work on the subject’) was a running gag in J.B. Morton’s ‘Beachcomber’ column in the
Eritrea’s war of independence, waged against its imperial neighbour Ethiopia, lasted 30 years and ended in 1991. Often, in the British media, the case against covering the conflict was that...
Jeffrey Richelson is an expert on the American secret intelligence agencies, particularly on their peculiar devotion to spying without spies – their reliance on aerial or satellite imagery,...
If you wanted intelligent conversation in 18th-century Hamburg, there was no better place to go than Dreyer’s coffee house, where the professional and cultural elite gathered to discuss the...
It is 26 years since Oswald Mosley breathed his last at the Temple de la Gloire, the athletic frame which he had once so proudly flexed now sadly bloated, his piercing eyes shrunk to peepholes,...
In September 1814, the European powers were meeting at Vienna to carve up the continent after the fall of Napoleon. The delegation from the Grand Duchy of Baden was hoping to consolidate the...
What are we to make of the Red Army? On the one hand, it was the force that first stopped and then destroyed the armies of German National Socialism, in achieving which Russian soldiers suffered...
As marriages of convenience go, few can have turned out less conveniently than that of George IV and Caroline of Brunswick. The couple brought out the worst in each other, and there was a great...
I am old enough to remember listening to the results of the general election of 1945 and sensing the surprise at the size of Attlee’s majority shared by Conservative and Labour supporters...
Henry VIII is the most immediately recognisable of all English monarchs, present company excepted. He has been declared a national icon, and we are told that he vies with Adolf Hitler for the...
The seed for this book was planted in 1972, when Carmen Callil saw Le Chagrin et la pitié, Marcel Ophuls’s stunning documentary of life in Clermont-Ferrand during World War Two. Her...
Winding south-east from Ouarzazate through the Drâa Valley in Morocco, the road peters out after Zagora. Beyond, lie the swelling dunes of the Great Eastern Erg, the Algerian frontier, open...
The Anglo-Saxons had no libraries in the sense that we understand the word: rooms, or better still buildings, dedicated to the storage of books. St Aldhelm of Malmesbury wrote a Latin riddle with...
If there is a prize for best title of the year, this book surely deserves it. Alexei Yurchak, a Russian-born, US-trained anthropologist, has written an interesting and provocative book about the...
The Central African Federation was one of the most bizarre creations of late British imperialism. Formed controversially in 1953 out of the colonies of Northern and Southern Rhodesia and...