Writing about authoritarianism by Mary Beard, James Meek, Linda Colley, Walter Laqueur, Hilary Mantel, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Lloyd Parry.
Pico’s Oration contravenes the very idea of human possibility that we think the Renaissance is about – yet we think of the Renaissance this way partly because of a centuries-long misreading of it. In which case, does Pico really belong to the Renaissance? Or is our whole idea of the Renaissance hopelessly flimsy, nothing but a collection of fantasies about what it means to be modern and human?
At two o’clock in the morning on 23 October 1731, ‘a great smoak’ began to pour from the rafters of Ashburnham House in Westminster. The library was on fire, which meant that English history was . . .
There’s a scene in Joe Dunthorne’s novel Submarine in which Oliver, the teenage protagonist, is served carrots so overcooked they look ‘out of focus’. It’s a joke repurposed in Children of . . .
At ten past ten on the morning of 2 June 1948, Karl Brandt climbed on the black gallows in the courtyard of Landsberg Prison in Bavaria. An American military tribunal had sentenced him to death for . . .
Just six elements are always necessary for the formation of life as we know it: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulphur. Collectively, they are known by the clumsy, vaguely pharaonic . . .
The only certainty about the picture is that it shows Francis Williams. No one has ever been able to discover who painted it, when, where or why. And then, a few months ago, everything changed.
At the turn of the 20th century, the Swiss were plagued by strange, interlinked medical conditions, which existed elsewhere to a degree, but in Switzerland were endemic in more than 80 per cent of the country. It was a curse that had a mark: the goitre.
Public speech was a – if not the – defining attribute of maleness. A woman speaking in public was, in most circumstances, by definition not a woman.
He sounds like the Europeans described by V.S. Naipaul – the grandson of indentured labourers – in A Bend in the River, who ‘wanted gold and slaves, like everybody else’, but also ‘wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves’.
It is possible to take too many notes; the task of sorting, filing and assimilating them can take for ever, so that nothing gets written. The awful warning is Lord Acton, whose enormous learning never resulted in the great work the world expected of him.
Robespierre thought that, if you could imagine a better society, you could create it. He needed a corps of moral giants at his back, but found himself leading a gang of squabbling moral pygmies. This is how Virtue led to Terror.
In a happier age, Immanuel Kant identified one of the problems of understanding any of the genocides which come all too easily to mind. It is the problem of the mathematical sublime. The...
Afew weeks ago, in Mexico, I was asked to sign a protest against Christopher Columbus, on behalf of the original native populations of the American continents and islands, or rather, of their...
War has been throughout history the curse and inspiration of mankind. The sufferings and destruction that accompany it rival those caused by famine, plague and natural catastrophes. Yet in nearly...
Writing about authoritarianism by Mary Beard, James Meek, Linda Colley, Walter Laqueur, Hilary Mantel, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Lloyd Parry.
Writing about myth and the stories we tell ourselves by Margaret Anne Doody, Marina Warner, Mary Beard, Anne Carson, James Davidson, Tom Shippey, Joanna Kavenna, Lorna Sage and Michael Wood.
Colm Tóibín tells the story of Easter 1916, following the main personalities involved, including Thomas Clarke and Patrick Pearse.
From Medusa to Merkel, Mary Beard considers the extent to which the exclusion of women from power is culturally embedded.
Christopher Clark explains why the revolutions of 1848 weren’t failures, and why we should think about them now.
Seas are repetitive creatures, working in cycles of tides, migration and climate change, which is normally to say the waxing and waning of the Ice Age. It is the coast that creates the past. The ancients...
The library made possible a new kind of intellectual life. Machiavelli, when he’d been exiled from Florence, described a later version of this life in a splendidly ironic letter to Francesco Vettori:...
While they may have converted out of fear for their lives, many New Christians were eager to integrate into mainstream Christian society. They joined religious orders, sponsored family chapels in churches...
The English republic isn’t recalled with much fondness by anyone. It is known as a fun-sapping entity that cancelled Christmas and banned the theatre. To royalists and conservatives it will for ever...
Now that the war is so long ago, the subject of Nazi exiles in South America can seem a stale, even dubious preoccupation. The fact that fiercely anti-communist South American dictatorships allowed Germans...
Gulbadan Begum was the daughter of the founder of the Mughal Empire. She is the only Mughal woman known to have written an imperial history. Conditions in the Age of Emperor Humayun was composed when she...
It would be tempting to repeat the salacious stories told about Augustus the Strong, but Tim Blanning has instead produced an authoritative account of his reign and a measured reckoning of what Augustus...
In 1943, the Allies founded the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration to care for civilians and the displaced and to help military authorities get them back ‘home’. Very quickly...
How can we account for France’s historical wavering on race, between an extraordinary openness to assimilation and outbursts of unashamed racism? French revolutionaries held such extreme views, William...
Crippen may be the name forever associated with the ‘North London cellar murder’, but in Hallie Rubenhold’s book he is treated as one character in ‘an ensemble cast brought together to tell a more...
Cannae made Hannibal more than just another name in the endless list of Rome’s enemies, but the elephants helped too. Twenty of them marched from Spain to Italy with Hannibal and his enormous army in...
Even if they had been appeasers, most Conservatives accepted the patriotic necessity of the war, but had many different ideas about what its outcome should be, some as optimistic as any socialist dreams...
It’s puzzling, unsettling even, to see ‘free speech’ rearing its head in public debate again, rousing passions which seemed long defunct. Wasn’t the doctrine definitively trumpeted by Milton...
The West Saxons may have promoted their version of the national story more successfully than the Mercians, but it is salutary to remember that if things had gone differently, the capital of England might...
The queer topography of London emerges in these books like a heat map, flaring in patches round the edges at Shepherd’s Bush Green or Clapham Common, where activity concentrates at night around public...
The British aversion to touching wasn’t limited to the Victorian era: comparative studies confirm that we continue to be more selective about when and where we are touched than people from other countries....
Whereas Isaiah Berlin saw no necessary connection between liberty and democracy, Quentin Skinner argues that representative democracy is the only form of governance that can guarantee liberty as independence:...
The pyramids are so central to the modern view of Egypt, and to Egyptian tourism, that it is hard not to speak about them in clichés. Yet visiting them, one is reminded how mysterious and extraordinary...
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