Jonathan Parry teaches 19th-century history at Cambridge. His short history of political liberalism in Britain comes out in April.
One can imagine the dilemma this sound narrative history posed to a publisher looking for a catchy title. Even so, The First Cold War is an unhelpful one. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Britain and Russia did not seek to divide the world between them and very rarely pointed weapons at each other. Russia fought almost two dozen wars after 1783, but only the Crimean War of 1854-56 and the...
When we think of the fashions of the 1890s, several objects come to mind: the tennis racquet, the golfing cap, the Daily Mail, a full-length Singer Sargent portrait, The Diary of a Nobody. In 1896, A. & C. Black purchased the rights to a dull annual almanac called Who’s Who and relaunched it the following year in a format designed to appeal to contemporary taste. The original
In 1863 extracts from the journal of the Hon. Impulsia Gushington were published under the title Lispings from Low Latitudes. Impulsia had joined the fad for Egyptian travel and enjoyed an English lady’s usual adventures with camels, pyramids and cunning Orientals. Finally, she fell for the charms of a French aristocrat, Monsieur de Rataplan, and a sequel was promised that would...
The quirkiest of the British Isles is a self-governing jurisdiction between Guernsey and France just over three miles long and less than two miles wide. Sark has its own parliament, its own taxes and its own traffic laws (permitting only tractors, bikes and horse-drawn vehicles). Its central, fertile plateau is protected by cliffs on almost all sides that rise to over three hundred feet....
‘Do dogs commit suicide?’ ‘Can monkeys smoke?’ ‘An electrical flying machine?’ Those who were intrigued by such matters in 1888 sought enlightenment from a new weekly magazine, Answers to Correspondents, which also explained ‘How to Cure Freckles’, ‘Terrors of Top Hats’, and ‘The Destiny of Lost Luggage’. The...
The Ottoman regime allowed the British considerable latitude so long as they didn’t directly threaten Ottoman interests. The British themselves only slowly realised quite how lucky they were in having...
This impressive study of Victorian politics is built around a challenging thesis: that Gladstone, far from being the creator of the Liberal Party, was in fact a maverick who stumbled into the...
The culture, of the first fifty years or so of this century – ‘Modernism’ – comes increasingly to be seen in historical perspective: as a period of the past with its own...
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