Who was it who invented the first black cakes Or the uncounted poppy-seed? Who mix’d The yellow compounds of delicious sweetmeats? This was one of many questions asked by the poet...
Malcolm Bull has written a formidable handbook, for which, I predict, many scholars and lovers of Renaissance art will never forgive him. What he has to say in the end about the revival of the...
In January 1978, the Sex Pistols, then and now the most famous punk band in the world, split up. Johnny Rotten, the band’s singer, most unstable musical element, and most adored and reviled...
When I was growing up in Australia in the late 1950s and 1960s, the displaced European intellectual turned academic was a familiar figure on university campuses. Refugees from totalitarian and...
Tasmania has long been a convenient receptacle for Australia’s gothic fantasies and projections. This is in part because of the island’s relative isolation, and because convicts...
Why is the flourishing genre of ‘what if?’ histories the preserve of conservative historians? The introduction to such volumes typically begins with an attack on Marxists, who...
‘So violent and motley was life that it bore the mixed smell of blood and of roses.’ Helen Castor quotes Johan Huizinga’s description of the waning of the Middle Ages at the...
The family is a subject on which, for obvious reasons, there is no shortage of public or private views. Google records 368 million items under the word ‘family’, as against a mere 170...
What is it we expect of generals who exercise high command? The answer comes reflexively: in wartime, the measure of merit is victory. Great captains win battles, campaigns, wars. In fact,...
Do you speak Whiggish? The most recent edition of the Oxford English Dictionary does not, it appears – at least not fluently. The original OED, compiled in the late 19th and early 20th...
Tucked away in the lanes of Old Delhi, not far from the Red Fort of the Mughal emperors, sits the little visited Anglican church of St James, consecrated in 1836. With its Renaissance-style dome...
In 1822 Giacomo Leopardi was finally allowed to leave home and visit Rome. He was 24. A child prodigy, he had spent his life in the remote town of Recanati in the Italian Marche, governed at that...
A modern criminal trial can be exceedingly inconvenient. The more fairly conducted it is, the less certain the outcome. The accuser can end up all but in the dock; the accused may walk away from...
When John Wesley visited Bath in 1739 to inveigh against the follies that flourished at hot springs, he was challenged by a fleshy, domineering figure in a white beaver hat, who demanded to know...
In the eyes of the Nazis, to die for the Third Reich was a privilege, a privilege reserved for ‘Aryans’. In 1943 that perception began to change, however. With Allied armies pressing...
There has probably never been a society that did not erect barriers to certain kinds of knowledge. Moralists since Greek and Roman antiquity have frowned on busybodies who pry into their...
Oscar Wilde called experience the name one gives to one’s mistakes, while for Samuel Johnson it was what hope triumphed over for those who married a second time. Emerson thought all...
At Mrs H.G. Wells’s funeral on 22 October 1927, Virginia Woolf was surprised that HGW’s ‘typewritten sheets’ were read by ‘a shaggy, shabby old scholar’, T.E....