In 1629, King Charles I granted the Massachusetts Bay Company a standard commercial charter containing a clerical slip that changed the world. The document charged the stockholders with duly...
‘The greatest mercenary of an age when soldiers of fortune flourished,’ says the cover flap of Frances Stonor Saunders’s biography of Sir John Hawkwood (c.1320-94), one-time...
On Easter day, I walked down Farringdon Road from Rosebery Avenue, towards Farringdon Station. I intended to make a voyage to one of the planet’s more mysterious realms, the point at which...
Tom Maschler’s memoir, Publisher, appeared in bookshops on 18 March. It might as well not have done. The book was dead on arrival, having been subjected to a barrage of premature review and...
In a speech given early last month, Michael Howard shared his thoughts on education with the Welsh Conservative Party Conference in Cardiff. He was mainly concerned with the problem of...
Fashion was always famous for its power, but only quite recently have people believed it has meaning. From time to time during the last two hundred years, writers have uneasily asserted that...
What on earth, you ask, is a scarith? Well, it is a sort of mud-piecrust package, which may be tubular in shape, containing in various layers documents of immense antiquity. What language is the...
For three days – les trois glorieuses – at the end of July 1830, Paris was in turmoil. The attempt by Charles X and his ultra-royalist first minister, the Prince de Polignac, to stamp...
The Institute of Economic Affairs is approaching its 50th birthday, and has much to celebrate. It was founded in the heyday of the so-called Keynesian consensus that dominated British political...
This book changed my sense of the big story of Soviet history as well as the big story of the Jews in the modern world.* Chapter 4, in particular, the interpretative history of Jews in the Soviet...
How excessive was the excess of the past? Scott Fitzgerald may have decided that the very rich are different from you and me, but they live in our own time; so we can begin to comprehend their...
A small note – not the stuff of headlines, obviously – appeared in the newspapers on 3 February. In response to a call for the prohibition of the public display of the swastika and...
Angela Brkic’s The Stone Fields is subtitled ‘An Epitaph for the Living’, but its underlying and overwhelming theme is death – death in Bosnia. It is a chronicle of...
‘Certain families,’ Kipling wrote in his story ‘The Tomb of His Ancestors’, ‘serve India generation after generation as dolphins follow in line across the open...
Hardly any aspect of British life has combined religion, class, ideology, politics and law more potently than attitudes to gambling – not even attitudes to drink and sex. That is because,...
In Niall Ferguson’s panegyric to British colonialism, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003), Kenya gets just one significant mention. It comes in the introduction, and is a...
Would Sherlock Holmes have been able to solve the mystery of the Mary Celeste? Had he been invented sooner, he might have given it a go. There’s an early story by Arthur Conan Doyle called...
You might think that Trafalgar Square says it all. Its massive column surmounted by the 18-foot-high statue of Horatio Nelson, the bas-reliefs at the base commemorating his ships’...