Under the headline ‘The Dead Rabbits Immortalised’, the New York Evening Post reported on 10 July 1857 that a one-penny song sheet was selling feverishly ‘in the lower part of...
Hossein Kharrazi’s bicycle was leaning against the wall of his parents’ house in Isfahan. Mrs Kharrazi told me to come in, rearranging her chador so it wouldn’t slide off her...
Shortly before she died a few years ago, my Aunt Lizzie was recalling her courting days in the late 1920s and early 1930s and remembering the dance-halls in the locality; places which survived...
How is empire to be understood in an age that takes nations and nationalism for granted? For those who were once invaded by empires which have since become defunct, this rarely seems a problem....
On 1 June 1731, the Billy brothers, Guillaume and François, waved goodbye to their ship, the Diligent, as it set sail from Brittany. It was weighed down with Indian cloth, cowry shells...
Earlier this year, the Historical Museum in Stockholm housed a haunting exhibition by the artist Hanna Sjöberg. She called it A Clean Sweep Will Be Made (a wartime phrase of...
The title of Orlando Figes’s impressively wide-ranging book refers to a scene in War and Peace in which Natasha Rostov, the finest product of the European education favoured by the Russian...
Humphrey Carpenter is a practised biographer; he can do groups as well as single persons, but he admits that this group set him a new problem, which was that he remained throughout unsure whether...
The organisers of the Festival of Britain in 1951 knew what to celebrate. At the start of the opening ceremony – a service in St Paul’s – the King praised the nation’s...
The Old Head of Kinsale juts out into the Atlantic from the southern coast of Ireland. For centuries sea captains have used it as a landmark. On 7 May 1915 a local family named Henderson,...
Travellers to the western Polish city of Wroclaw in the 1980s could still encounter Germans who had lived there before the Second World War. One of those who escaped the mass exodus of the German...
Samuel Pepys was the son of a London tailor and a president of the Royal Society. He was a philanderer who could feed a wench lobster before having his way with her under a chair in a tavern...
What is it our mammas bewitches To plague us little boys with breeches? To tyrant Custom we must yield Whilst vanquished Reason flies the field. Our legs must suffer by ligation To keep the...
The memoirs of Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, are among the more remarkable documents of the 18th century. Begun by 1704, they were written, rewritten and ghostwritten over three...
Tangier, 1684. A motley group of soldiers scrambles over the ruins of a town, burying beneath the rubble newly minted coins that bear the image of Charles II. This least remembered of the...
Since two pioneering studies appeared in 1954, Arnaldo Momigliano’s ‘Gibbon’s Contribution to Historical Method’, and Giuseppe Giarrizzo’s Edward Gibbon e la cultura...
When New York Radical Women demonstrated against the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City in 1968, they dropped an assortment of ‘instruments of female torture’ into a ‘trash...
Over the long term, Germans have made a good job of confronting the criminal, genocidal character of the Third Reich. Historical writing, schoolbooks, literary works, public and political debate...