Diarmaid MacCulloch

The Middle East​ isn’t short of ruins (there are many more now than there were a few years ago), and until the turn of the millennium archaeologists believed that those at Khirbet Qeiyafa, twenty miles south-west of Jerusalem, belonged to a large farm of the fourth to third centuries bce. It was an interesting, ancient but hardly unusual site. But then excavations beginning in 2007...

I must​ make a declaration of interest in reviewing this book: the author’s surname suggests that we are distant relatives. My mother’s family name was also Chappell: they dropped the ‘e’ from the end as they faded into the general population of this country, after arriving from France to settle in Staffordshire, the heartland of England’s nascent...

Next autumn​ marks the half-millennium since an event now so mythic that some have doubted it ever took place. If it did, the date was 31 October 1517. The main actor belonged to a religious Order known as the Hermits of Saint Augustine, Martin Luther by name, though he also tried out a hybrid Greek/Latin polish for his surname by dressing it up as ‘Eleutherius’, ‘the...

Here is​ a description of terrorism: ‘Observers were stunned by the insurgents’ violence. By the time they reached the city, they had already acquired a fearsome reputation, but never anything like this massacre … wars had always been conducted within mutually agreed limits; in horror it was reported that they did not spare the elderly, the women, or the sick.’ I...

Among​ many technical advances in archaeology in recent years, dendrochronology is one of the most satisfying. Now cloven and carved wood can speak to us and tell us its age. It needs the prompting of a computer, but informed by masses of e-data charting the sequences of variations in tree-rings, we can know when and even roughly where a tree was felled. Carpentry can often be far older...