Gold is the most metaphysical of the metals. A couple of layers of gilding, and items of everyday experience attain perfection: golden calf, golden section, golden goal. In the form of money,...
In 1853 the Reverend Frederick Morris, an opponent of Charles Darwin’s and a man with a Victorian sense of propriety, urged his parishioners to emulate the fidelity of a small bird called...
The tank, I was surprised to learn, was a British invention. It provided a much-needed response to the recent development of barbed wire, fortified trenches and rapid-fire machine-guns. Armoured...
‘Marijuana has no therapeutic value, and its use is therefore always an abuse and a vice,’ trumpeted Harry Anslinger, the implacable Commissioner of the US Bureau of Narcotics in...
In 1586, William Camden reported in Britannia, his travel guide to British curiosities, that the bones of giants had been discovered in Essex. The evidence took the form of limb bones the size of...
In Prague people still say: ‘I do not want to die like Tycho Brahe.’ This means: ‘I have to go to the lavatory.’ In this way the memory of the greatest astronomer of early...
In 1997, in the space of four months, more than three-quarters of a million people – the highest attendance for any postwar exhibition in Germany – queued to be admitted to the
For the past four years, a debate has raged in Australia over whether the process of reconciliation between its indigenous and non-indigenous populations should include a formal apology for past...
‘In twenty years,’ Lady Astor used to say of Philip Kerr, Lord Lothian, ‘I’ve never known Philip to be wrong on foreign politics.’ Though Lothian himself thought...
Trying to define Romanticism has always been a typically Romantic activity, especially in France. The word romantisme first appeared in the year of Napoleon’s coronation (1804) and soon...
By the end of the 20th century, Joan was known throughout the world for inspiring the campaign that ultimately brought the expulsion of the English from France; for having been burned by the English; for...
For most of its history the United States has been within the mainstream of Western enlightened thought and practice with respect to the death penalty. Sometimes ahead of the curve: Michigan...
I am going to end up talking about love, but let me start by talking about money. Money, as Marx tells us, is the enemy of mankind and social bonds. ‘If you suppose man to be man and his...
In Donna Tartt’s novel The Secret History, a group of clever, fastidious preppies in a small liberal arts college on the East Coast reinvent the cult of Dionysus. They brew a concoction of...
What does a Princeton graduate whose old dream it was to write for the New Yorker do when that dream comes true, only to discover that his cherished magazine is no longer the middlebrow arbiter...
My great-uncle Alfred Hollis was in his early forties when he died; he was a bachelor and had never worked. According to my aunt he was always dressed beautifully, quite beyond his means. In the...
Before he became Senator for New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was an academic and the author, with Nathan Glazer, of Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians and Irish...
The rhetorical yield from the first atomic explosion was low – only one entry for the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. When the plutonium bomb exploded on the Jornada del Muerto near...