While the British adhered to the well-established concept of the ‘two Germanies’, and tried to bring out the civilised tradition of Beethoven and Goethe while suppressing the uncivilised tradition...
Writing is not now considered a collective exercise. The Romantic myth of the lone genius persists. He is no longer always a white man – only most of the time. The black and white author photo is this...
The multiple meanings of Classics explain why classicists often seem to be talking at cross purposes, bewildered by voices inside and outside the discipline who say we are refusing to confront its elitism,...
The ‘I’ of autobiography and racial belonging is not assumed in Imperial Intimacies. Hazel V. Carby’s shifting perspectives for her present and past selves – her narrative moves from the singular...
When Roman ambassadors asked what it would take to get Alaric to open the port, his answer was not citizenship but five thousand pounds of gold, thirty thousand pounds of silver, four thousand silk tunics,...
The well-oiled pistons of the market-state are increasingly accompanied by the creaks and squabbles of a Chinese dynasty. The country’s prized state companies are overrun by kinship networks. It is not...
No one wants to be ‘puritanical’: better to be thought fun-loving, broadminded, easygoing, even (perhaps especially) if we’re not. Puritans hold a mirror to the anxious self-image of individuals...
Just like the term ummah, the practical salience of the concept of dar al-islam waxed and waned throughout history. Cemil Aydin wants to remind us that Muslims have always lived in discrete empires, spoken...
The Aeneid is not all about male virtues and egos. The overall plot depends on the wrath of the goddess Juno, and room is also made for the quieter voices of aged fathers, local rustic deities and Italian...
It is usual for urban centres to contain extreme contrasts and not unusual for them to be scenes of conflict. What is striking about the West End is the peculiar compound of establishment and anti-establishment,...
Reformers said that non-smokers took fewer sick days, fewer breaks; they rarely referred to smoking as a public health problem that might have something to do with class and racial in equality, lack...
The real ancient city was nothing like the way we imagine it, not even Rome after three hundred years of megalomaniac generals and emperors had stuffed it full of ever more grandiose monuments. Most ancient...
The ease with which members of the second generation of Sassoons acquired the trappings of Englishness, after moving to Britain, and (like Ferdinand de Rothschild) became intimate with the Prince of Wales...
A typical headline in the Los Angeles Times read: HIPPIES BLAMED FOR DECLINE OF THE SUNSET STRIP. Yet in the longer term the teenagers won a partial victory. As the bands that played on the Strip became...
In the 1960s, the stereotype of the Algerian returnee was of an aggressive, vaguely psychotic lout, a know-nothing redneck – depicted as le beauf in cartoons by the Charlie Hebdo illustrator Cabu. That...
In the opening scene of his television series Civilisation (1969), Kenneth Clark admits that while he can’t define exactly what civilisation is, he knows it when he sees it. The camera...
In the late 1950s, the CIA’s schemes included using an aerosol to lace the air with LSD in the Havana studio where Fidel Castro made his radio broadcasts, sprinkling Castro’s boots with thallium...
To cheers of ‘Viva Castro! Viva Cuba!’ the delegation took up position at the Hotel Theresa in Harlem, which became a kind of opposition headquarters during the UN session. Malcolm X was the first...