In the early 1990s, the historian Gretchen Gerzina went to a London bookshop looking for a copy of Peter Fryer’s Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (1984). When she asked the shop assistant for help she was told ‘Madam, there were no black people in England before 1945.’ In fact, people racialised as black have been in Britain for more than two thousand years.
On 16 August 1960, a US air force captain called Joseph Kittinger stepped out of a balloon. The balloon was 102,800 feet above the Earth. It would be an exaggeration to say that Kittinger jumped...
On 24 August 1848 an advertisement in the Brooklyn Eagle triumphantly announced a performance by ‘the most extraordinary and interesting man in miniature in the known world’. Charles...
I had supper with a friend on 31 August 1997. He arrived looking wonderstruck. ‘Are we just going to have dinner?’ he said.
‘Why, you think we should sit shiva?’
...
If you’re a woman – and a woman haunted by feelings of cowardice – it’s hard to know where to stand with all of this. You regret the appalling, absurd waste of life. You excoriate the madness of the system. You rail against war. You see the savage toll the cult of heroism takes – has always taken – on men and boys. But painful too – at times exorbitantly so, once you become sensitised to it – the near-total exclusion of your own sex from such primal dramas of unflinching physical courage.
The truth is that surfing – the sense of perfect communion with the sea, the feel of the board underfoot, skimming the surface of the water – is worth the risk of a shark encounter, and would continue to be worth it even if the risk were greater than it actually is. It is on land, and not when I am waiting on my board for a wave, that the fear grips.
He died, one Jesuit said, ‘like a flower in the field that closes at night’. Some time in the evening of 28 September 1978 Albino Luciani, Pope John Paul I, abandoned his tenure of...
Imprisoned though he is in that wonderfully self-satisfied French tradition of announcing and defining, Derrida must none the less be said to be spot-on about diaries. He says in Of Grammatology:...
‘See America first’: the old tourist-office advertising slogan made it sound easy. The most famous moment in the history of exploration, however, is also one of the most baffling. In...
‘I have made myself very rich,’ Trump says (over and over again). ‘I would make this country very rich.’ That’s why he should be president. He insists that he’s the ‘most successful man ever to run’, never mind the drafters of the constitution or the supreme commander of the allied forces.
Every year, sometimes in September, but usually in October just before Halloween, when California’s wild vegetation is driest and most combustible, high pressure over the Great Basin and...
By what witchcraft did I receive this book about so-called pagan festivals on the same day that the Times ran an article on an organisation that calls itself the Pagan Hospice and Funeral Trust?...
On 11 November 1855, a massive earthquake and tsunami destroyed most of Japan’s capital city, Edo, the precursor of modern Tokyo. Roughly 7000 people were reported dead or injured, and the...
It was an extraordinarily long premiership – indeed the longest of the century by a considerable margin. In part, this was because the Opposition was divided, its members seemingly...
What did Lucian Freud know about pregnancy? Not very much, perhaps. But he did know about sex. The expression on Kitty’s face is not dissimilar to that of an animal before mating.