England was certainly an oddity to her friends and enemies on the Continent. ‘There was no school in the world where one could learn how to negotiate with the English,’ the Spanish envoy Íñigo Vélez...
Ursula Kuczynski vowed to be better than her mother, an artist whose main talent was for self-regard. However, she found being a good parent harder than being a good communist, and when she had to choose...
Divine intervention was not claimed for the duel. At stake was the question of honour. A gentleman could have any number of differences with his peers without coming to blows, but when his honour was sullied...
George’s defenders cannot have it both ways. Either they take the king whole, hot and strong and stubborn to the last; or they have to sideline him as an endearing nullity. To present him as a great...
In 1638 Thomas Hobbes advised his aristocratic tutee Charles Cavendish ‘to avoid all offensive speech, not only open reviling but also that Satirical way of nipping’ that young noblemen were prone...
Gradual changes have already started to act as counterforces to the follies of unbridled speculation, fears of uncontrolled immigration and contagions of civil war. For Stella Ghervas, balance of power...
‘We won’t allow people to censor our past,’ Robert Jenrick, then communities secretary, said in January. ‘It is our privilege in this country to have inherited a deep,...
The territory of the USSR closely matched that of the imperial Russia of the tsars’ empire, with Russian still the lingua franca and a major Russian city its capital. It was natural to ask whether this...
The Empire Windrush, bringing eight hundred Caribbean passengers to Britain, docked at Tilbury on 21 June 1948, while the Nationality Act was still going through Parliament. Here again, myth has fogged...
Antigonus’ grandfather had compared Athens to a lighthouse for its effect on public opinion in Greece. For more than forty years the Antigonids had hoped to win the city’s endorsement, and had at times...
When the Manhattan Project was launched in 1942, the military was fully on board and totally in charge. The army knew all about secrecy in weapons development and how to ensure it: people were vetted;...
The many young economists who devoted themselves to preventing shock therapy fell from power in 1989 when Zhao Ziyang was ousted: like Zhao, their support for the Tiananmen Square protesters had political...
Having announced to the world that they traded only in legitimate produce, and with idealistic shoppers content to pay more for goods made by free hands, merchants on both sides of the Atlantic found establishing...
The new fad for ‘levelling up’ doesn’t show any weakening of the Tory mindset. On the contrary, it seems that the levelling is to be achieved almost exclusively by the brilliance and munificence...
The lush comic hip-hop of Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B illustrates the core element of Old Comedy that is most often obscured in contemporary Anglophone translations – the flow. Aristophanes, like...
The new capitalist economy produced a form of civic equality. In ever more areas of daily life, men and women operated under the same formal abstract rules – the rules of the consumer marketplace –...
Milman Parry, Albert Lord and Nikola Vujnović toured the villages of Bosnia and Herzegovina, interviewing and recording the guslari they met there. Some sang tales from legend; others told of the assassination...
The index gave its users formidable power to find and quote adages and examples, narratives and poems, scriptural and patristic texts, whether or not they had actually read the full works they cited. That...