Printed in 1958, the Bible given to me as a child was illustrated with photographs of the Holy Land. I was particularly taken with the ‘Native House near Bethlehem’. A woman broods...
Once I rebuked for bad taste a friend who described Savonarola, at his execution, as ‘serving as the pièce de résistance of a public bonfire’. Actually his taste was...
Mostly I remember the quick pearlescent cloud, the puff of white it made in the rush of current, when I dumped Hughey’s ashes in the water. And watching what remained of him disappear...
He expected it to end badly, and it did: a bullet from a pistol which shattered his jaw, a night of unspeaking agony, death without trial. During that night – ninth Thermidor, or 27 July...
A recent French documentary about Pierre Bourdieu is entitled, after one of his own pronouncements: La Sociologie est un sport de combat. When he died in January 2002, Bourdieu was widely...
17th-century Londoners saw coffee initially as a powerful drug, and only by and by came to regard it in non-medical terms. Above all, it was said to sharpen the wits – an effect related to, but distinct...
‘All history is the history of unintended consequences, but that is especially true when we are trying to untangle humanity’s relationship with the natural environment,’ David...
Ever since Samuel Johnson’s icy comment of 1775 – ‘How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?’ – British observers have felt...
In Henry James and the Art of Dress (2001), Clair Hughes gave us a beautifully judged view of James’s delicate way with garments. She showed that he was capable of conveying the effect of...
I should say at the outset that I know István Rév; that I have walked with him through the cemeteries of Budapest and have seen in his company some of the graves he writes about. He...
Just beyond Croydon – I will not share its exact whereabouts – there is a lane I take whenever I drive to visit my father in his retirement. For six precious minutes, it unfolds up...
At the time of the devolution referendum of 1997, doom-mongers feared that the Scots were about to join ‘a motorway without exits’. Separation from England seemed inevitable in the...
A raven used to be an oracular sight, an omen, impressive, noble, wild; now it is bad news, a weed, trouble. This decline is worrying not just in what the birds do but in what they mean. And it turns the...
Our ancestors, it seems, did not sleep as we do, we who live by clock time. Their night was divided into a first sleep and a second sleep; in the early hours they woke. Some meditated, some prayed, some...
Peter Green’s splendid new translation of Catullus makes quite a substantial volume: more than three hundred pages in all, with an introduction, parallel text in Latin and English, notes,...
Some of the words we use about Africa die hard. No African civilians on the run from injustice, war or hunger can bide their time in mere ‘camps’. They have to be ‘makeshift...
Leo Amery, who lived and breathed the British Empire and could claim to have invented the Commonwealth, would doubtless find it sad that he is chiefly remembered for helping to bring down Neville...
To paraphrase Roland Barthes, hats are worn to be seen and to be read. They are signs of who we are or want to be. Because hats, unlike shoes or coats, are worn near eye-level, they are the...