The women who invented beauty came from far away. They lied about their ages and their origins and the source of their magic; their secrets were known only to certain chemists and secretaries and...
The Emperor Nero died on 9 June 68 CE. The Senate had passed the ancient equivalent of a vote of no-confidence; his staff and bodyguards were rapidly deserting him. The Emperor made for the...
The Battle of Edmonton, which began early in the morning of 12 December 1745, appeared to the combatants to have decided the nation’s future. The military details will be familiar to many...
‘Satan’s Grotto’ was the caption to the picture of Saddam Hussein’s hidey-hole on the front page of the Sun the day after the ex-dictator was captured by American forces....
It takes a special man to resist Hilda von Einem. A German spy in John Buchan’s Greenmantle (1916), she is a ‘known man-eater’, who tries to inspire a rising of ‘Muslim...
An excavation made in 1975, behind the town of Vedbaek in Denmark, revealed the body of a tiny child laid to rest in the embrace of a swan’s wing. Next to the skeleton was the grave of the...
Hugh Cudlipp and Cecil King had been colleagues for 15 years when Cudlipp was ejected from the editorship of the Sunday Pictorial. Though a director of the company, King made no attempt to save...
It took G.K. Chesterton to discover, in Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, this lethal vignette of a World War One profiteer: The many men, so beautiful! And they all dead did lie:...
Im`pro.vise, v.t. & v.i. 2. to make, provide or do with the tools and materials at hand, usually to fill an unforeseen and immediate need; as he improvised a bed out of leaves. Webster’s...
The first ‘wanted’ poster to be issued in Russia appeared in late February 1884, and featured six likenesses of the suspect: three frontal shots, showing a man in his late twenties,...
Until recently, the study of human prehistory relied on the material collected by archaeologists and palaeontologists. Bones, stones and pottery are not the only evidence now available to...
It may be pointless to try to establish which World War Two Axis aggressor, Germany or Japan, was the more brutal to the peoples it victimised. The Germans killed six million Jews and 20 million...
Will became an ardent public man, working well in those times when reforms were begun with a young hopefulness of immediate good which has been much checked in our days, and getting at last...
The first of these books is the product of an interdisciplinary conference at which literary critics and historians exchanged perspectives on a year conspicuous both for political conflict and...
Realism is one of the most elusive of artistic terms. ‘Unrealistic’, for example, is not necessarily the same as ‘non-realist’. You can have a work of art which is...
Most of the 18th-century political theorists with the biggest reputations come from rather out-of-the-way places, at least in geopolitical terms: Vico from Naples; Hume and Adam Smith from...
Who could ever forget everyday life in the old Soviet Union? The sheer oddness of the way the place functioned, the incongruity between functioning and pretension. The discomfort and...
In the 1990s New York was the capital city of America’s economic boom: now it is the epicentre of urban insecurity. The city is familiar with crisis, however, and no one could say it had...