Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City, released at the end of 1945. The movie begins with a version of the disclaimer that is now so common: ‘The characters in this film, even though they are inspired...
In the late morning of 30 April 1980, I left my flat to walk across to the Iranian embassy on Princes Gate. As I walked, I didn’t at first notice that something odd was happening and that the police...
Where amid this turmoil does neoliberalism stand? In emergency conditions it has been forced to take measures – interventionist, statist and protectionist – that are anathema to its doctrine, yet without...
Crusius plundered contemporary travel accounts for information alongside chronicles and histories. He recognised the connections between Greeks and Ottomans, seeing them as part of a common tradition of...
Marx meant Capital to read as if it were a pedagogical exercise in dispelling illusion, penetrating the veil that bourgeois economists had draped over a system that depends on the exploitation of labour...
What power does a child have? You could refuse your food or try to run away or escape into your imagination. You could take out your unhappiness on the smaller ones or on yourself. Soares refers to the...
‘Was it really the greatest siege?’ Catherine de Medici asked. ‘Greater even than Rhodes?’ ‘Yes, madame,’ the knight commander Antoine de La Roche answered, ‘greater even than Rhodes. It...
The binary of before and after a particular military event is often misleading when it comes to the experience of those who lived through it. For Jews and members of the Resistance, the days and weeks...
In 1399, Henry IV had deposed his cousin Richard II, who died in custody soon afterwards. Richard’s rule was so loathed that the army Henry amassed didn’t have to fight a single battle. Nevertheless,...
The Holy Alliance presented itself as an intimate spiritual union between the souls and consciences of its signatories rather than a conventional treaty between sovereigns. It thereby encouraged contemporaries...
Despite European and British efforts to emphasise the ‘traditional’ use of opium in both India and China, neither country had a history of production or consumption anything like those created by Western...
In American understanding, the Cold War was an ideological confrontation between freedom and democracy, on the one hand, and totalitarianism, on the other – a ‘war’, which implied that ultimately...
In the summer of 1860, an unprecedented wave of sectarian violence swept across Greater Syria. The massacre has long been studied but its causes remain misunderstood. Muslims, Jews and Christians of...
Joséphine Bonaparte and Térézia Tallien developed a new way of dressing that freed the body and redrew the female figure. The result was a high-waisted, one-piece dress in a light fabric, worn without...
Victor Serge’s self-conscious marginality, the cause of enormous struggle during his life, became a posthumous badge of authenticity: it helped reassure countless liberals and leftists that one could...
Christ himself made barely any pronouncements condemning sexuality. This has not stood in the way of Church authorities' lavish condemnation of all sorts of human desire.
With contemporary English including more than eighty thousand terms of French origin, Georges Clemenceau might have had a point when he argued that ‘the English language doesn’t exist – it’s just...
The will to colonise has not disappeared. Russia seeks to recolonise Ukraine. Israel relentlessly appropriates Palestinian land. Trump speaks of ‘reclaiming’ Canada, Greenland. The conditions that...