Liberals and socialists saw Józef Piłsudski as an enemy of parliamentary democracy; it would be fairer to say that he had nothing against elected parliaments so long as they stopped chattering and contradicting...
If the Crécy campaign was about anything, it was about Edward pressing his legalistic claim to be king of France as well as king of England. The battle did nothing to support that: indeed, it made him...
For minor kings and junior dynasts, the extra-European world was a place to amass wealth or responsibilities denied them at home. But they didn’t get to perform these fantasies of empire under conditions...
On 8 September 1919, the New York Times reported on a convention being held in Manhattan to discuss the atrocities then taking place in Ukraine. ‘Ukrainian Jews Aim to Stop Pogroms,’ the headline...
The tacit questions were: who is black and why? And what does being black signify? Black, it was commonly understood, signified Africa and slavery. But the puzzle was also a religious matter, since the...
These days it is rare to talk about ‘restoration’, ‘conservation’ being the preferred term. But while approaches change, the central problem of entropy remains. If you want to preserve an artefact...
Many Italians, including supporters of the resistance, condemned the partisans for inciting German reprisals. After the war, the myth of the left was that there had been mass support for the partisans,...
The demarcated ring on the grassy plateau was from its outset about heaven, in the sense of afterlife. Was it always also about the heavens, in the sense of sky-watching? Can we rediscover how Stonehenge’s...
As colonial historians have long appreciated, ‘runaway slave’ adverts provide the best surviving evidence of the appearance and individuality of large numbers of enslaved people. They also testify...
Ordinary people scarcely figure in the history of the English garden. Not because ordinary people had no gardens – they spider across 17th-century maps – or because the gardens they did have were purely...
Mary Parsons revealed that she had chosen to marry her husband because she suspected him of practising witchcraft. She was arrested, watched closely during the night and grilled about her belief that...
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...
The paper mill gave us a new textual economy, and in short order, a society clogged with text. What made paper different? Contemporaries were aware of its distinctive material qualities. One was its colour....
Democrats were so overjoyed at defeating Trump that for a time they failed to notice that the election returns called into question the demographic determinism which in recent years has led many Democrats...
Last year, Senate Republicans voted unanimously to make Juneteenth a national holiday, celebrating the wartime end of slavery and, in effect, the defeat of the Confederacy. The cultural struggle over the...
Hanzi script relied on concepts – pictography, ideography, logography – that the phonetic alphabet had superseded. The Roman alphabet, it was argued, had prevailed not because of its association with...
Who’s to say that one version of Welsh nationalism is more ‘true’ than any other? The claim that ‘Wales is a nation’ isn’t a descriptive statement: it is – or aspires to be – an illocutionary...
That he was a werewolf seems to have been common knowledge and Thiess himself freely admitted it – in fact, he said, it wasn’t even the first time it had been mentioned in court. Ten years earlier,...