Neal Ascherson

It  was breakfast time​ in the Europejski Hotel, that cold November morning in Warsaw forty years ago, when the waitresses suddenly stood still. Their eyes widened; they turned towards the radio. One of them softly began to sing along with the march now blaring across the room. But how did she, born a dozen years after Poland’s communist regime banned them, know those words...

The nobility of Poland-Lithuania, superbly quarrelsome and eccentric, left every Western visitor with a lifetime of traveller’s tales. The early 18th century put many European monarchies on the track to central control and absolutism, but the szlachta pushed the Commonwealth in the opposite direction. 

His great selling point was that he wasn’t Stalin or Khrushchev. Brezhnev, his colleagues assumed, wouldn’t have them shot or send their families to Siberia. And unlike Khrushchev, Stalin’s ebullient successor, he wouldn’t suddenly fire them in a drunken rage or set them impossible targets in titanic, half-baked projects.

Two fantasies of greatness were in conflict: the outworn vision of a global British ‘family’ radiating from the mother country, and the idea of the Commonwealth as a mighty moral example, showing the races of the world how to live in peace and unity. Both fantasies shared the belief that Great Britain was not an ordinary nation but – even in the post-imperial period – one summoned to follow a messianic destiny.

How​ did the Duke of Cumberland become the ‘Butcher’ of Culloden? Before and immediately after that battle, he was adored as the saviour of Hanoverian Britain from Jacobites and papists. As George II’s soldier son, he was the ‘martial Boy’; for Drury Lane audiences, ‘The noble Youth, whom ev’ry eye approves/ Each tongue applauds, and ev’ry...