Marranos, Moriscos, Mudejars, Mozarabs, Muwallads; converted Jews, converted Muslims, Muslims under Christian rule, Christians under Muslim rule, Christian converts to Islam: the early history of...
It is easy to loathe Michael Howard. It is less easy – because more intimidating in its implications – to loathe him for the right reasons. His record as Home Secretary before Her...
The last few years have seen a remarkable surge in studies of the Reformation period and this book by Diarmaid MacCulloch is the piece which completes the jigsaw, putting at the centre of the...
The great revolutions of the modern world never cease to be controversial, inside or outside their countries, as the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution recently demonstrated. In France...
At the heart of 19th-century socialism lay a vision of a moral world in which men and women would co-operate freely with one another to meet their common needs, a world in which, therefore,...
John Smith was ‘one of them’. Tony Blair is ‘one of them’. And so are Chris Smith and Jack Straw and half the Shadow Cabinet and many more on the backbenches including...
Stereotypes of the Far East, dominated by images of China and Japan, leave Korea in a vaguer limbo, of acronyms or bestiaries: NICs or Little Tigers. But if the Western traveller does arrive with...
He was famously (to use LRB-speak) a 14th earl, and this he essentially remained. He had inherited the title from his father, the 13th Earl, and lived at the ancestral family seat, the Hirsel,...
South Africa’s first democratic government is midway through its first term, an obvious moment at which to take stock of the transition. The rhetoric of ‘nation-building’ which...
In 1985-6, the word ‘sleaze’ appeared in British national newspapers 21 times; in 1994-95, 3479 times. The word still has no precise meaning. Often it refers to politicians’ sexual behaviour, which...
Northern Ireland, the Basque Country, Corsica, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Nagorno-Karabakh: this list of familiar trouble-spots is neither complete nor extended beyond Europe, in which case it would be...
Every summer, with the absence of Parliamentary news and the arrival of GCSE, A-level and degree results, the great education debate starts up again. This year’s is accompanied by two...
Iraq’s three Republican Guard divisions had just reached the 36th parallel when Clinton was told that the architect of his ‘family values’ election campaign, Richard Morris, was...
It was in Poland that the ice had started to crack. Early in 1956, at the 20th Party Congress in Moscow, Nikita Khrushchev had coupled his denunciation of Stalin with a promise of reform. The...
The principal Palestinian city on the West Bank is Ramallah, about ten miles north of Jerusalem. My parents and I spent the summer of l942 there. I recall it as a leafy, slow-paced and prosperous...
In any normal circumstances, Anthony Chenevix-Trench, one-time headmaster of Eton, should have been the subject of a police investigation and criminal charges. In the world of the public schools, however,...
Man, said Aristotle, is a political animal; it is his nature to live in a state. Men and women may live in political communities, modern liberals have retorted, but there’s nothing...
Before 1914, Europeans could cross national borders without a passport and without much noticing that a border had in fact been crossed. The Great War changed all that, or rather the postwar...