In 1931, a Nazi journal called the Dictatorship complained about the amazing popularity of Mickey Mouse: ‘Have we nothing better to do than decorate our garments with dirty animals because...
To kick-start a chronicle, a writer needs an attention grabber, usually a piquant item borrowed from mid-narrative. This history of the Tower Menagerie, founded 1235, begins on a winter day in...
It is the environment that must be held responsible for causing panic, not individual perversity. The wonder now is not that some of us sometimes can’t step out through the front door, but that any of...
Once upon a time there was a little girl who, at the age of two, had in some fashion to be told that her father had just cut off the head of the beautiful mother who used to lavish affection on...
Handel’s Xerxes begins with a famous largo, ‘Shade as it never was’ (Ombra mai fu), sung by the self-same King of Kings to his beloved: a plane tree. Aelian, a collector of...
When Richard, Duke of York, laid claim to the English throne in 1460, he presented himself as a physician, sent to heal the ills of the kingdom. In partnership with his apothecaries, the faithful...
Long before I’d had any thoughts about the importance of ceremony, I understood the nature of a cup of tea. As a child in a very small flat with two argumentative parents, a cup of tea...
On the morning of 5 August 1840, a large pleasure boat chartered by a Frenchman was under steam at London Bridge. The owners of the Edinburgh Castle seem to have been remarkably incurious about...
An often cited and much admired article by Charles Reich that appeared in the Yale Law Journal for 1964 tells us that ‘property performs the function of maintaining independence, dignity...
In the opening sentences of his last published work, The Passions of the Soul (1649), Descartes signalled his own modernity with a withering dismissal of the ancients, whose defects he found...
The London Corresponding Society was founded early in 1792 by a group of tradesmen who met in a pub off the Strand. The Society was to educate its members – expected to be artisans,...
At the tail-end of 1892 Robert Louis Stevenson was working on a novel. The book was going well but one thing was bothering him. Serial publication, he felt, might be difficult to secure, since...
Patrick Geary’s The Myth of Nations is more timely than he could have anticipated. ‘Historians have a duty to speak out,’ he writes, ‘even if they are certain to be...
The French Revolutionaries identified the Enlightenment as the work of a small, brave band of 18th-century philosophes, whom they rushed to entomb as heroes in the gloomy crypt of the...
Herman Kruk was a man of 42 and the director of the Yiddishist Grosser Library at the Cultural League in Warsaw when war broke out and he, along with other Jewish men who were in danger of being...
A poor gardener in Macedonia was riding a donkey when a soldier addressed him in Latin, asking him where he was taking the beast; unable to understand the question, he said nothing, whereupon the...
Harold Macmillan’s judgment on Anthony Eden, that ‘he was trained to win the Derby in 1938; unfortunately, he was not let out of the starting stalls until 1955,’ was echoed by...
Hollesley Bay Prison in Suffolk is an unlikely spiritual home for English socialism. Britain’s most easterly lock-up, its seaside location, stud-farm and dairy have earned it the nickname...