The department store is dying. It’s not the only building type to find itself marooned by social and economic change, but it is the youngest. Castles and churches, stately homes, factories and warehouses...
The wealth of India had been a legend in the Mediterranean since the fourth century BC, enhanced by Alexander the Great’s forays. India, not China, was Rome’s greatest trading partner. The sea was,...
Everywhere, it seems, human beings have believed that sexual desire must be curbed – it is ‘a source of conflict’, Maurice Godelier says, and ‘cannot be entirely left up to each individual’.
In July 2020 I drove through Lynch for the first time. Many buildings had been abandoned and boarded up. A rusted chute sloped down from the top of a concrete silo and disappeared into shrubs on the other...
Velázquez’s portraits give us a more penetrating understanding of the image that the Spanish monarchy wished to convey than any textual description supplied by accounts or pamphlets. The portraits reveal...
The descriptions of Nato by US leaders have often had little to do with the defence of Europe and a lot to do with Nato as a strategic asset to the US. In 1948 the US Army General Staff prepared a memorandum...
It was a ‘decade of heroes’, as E.P. Thompson put it. ‘There were Guevaras in every street and in every wood.’ Popular Front coalitions won power in France, Spain and Chile, and sympathisers with...
The story begins in 324 CE, when the emperor Constantine broke ground for a new city on the Bosphorus, on the site of the ancient polis of Byzantion. Notwithstanding later legend, this was not a Christian...
Fools – men and women from incongruous, humble backgrounds – were dropped into the grand settings of Whitehall or Hampton Court to see what would happen. Their ‘naturalness’, or ignorance of convention...
The French Revolution soon turned into a rout of women’s rights. In 1804, the Napoleonic Code reaffirmed a husband’s authority over his wife and the Bourbon Restoration rescinded the right to divorce...
Myths that sought to explain American history and chart a path to the future once helped to bind the country together. Today, they are absorbed into the culture wars, reflecting divergent understandings...
Adorno’s aesthetics are extreme. ‘He is an easy man to caricature,’ Ben Watson writes, ‘because he believed in exaggeration as a means of telling the truth.’ He is frequently, and rightly, upbraided...
After its fall, outsiders speculated that the Cuban regime would collapse and the island would transition, quickly or slowly, to capitalism. But then interested countries have always persuaded themselves...
Historians argue that the Venetian ghetto was both an open-air prison and a bright spot in the darkness of early modern European antisemitism. The government confined Jews to a ghetto, but did not expel...
Minstrels provided art as entertainment, but also, in a time before the mechanical production and reproduction of sound, laboured to make a wide range of noises appropriate for various occasions.
The legiones were open only (with rare exceptions) to citizens; non-citizens had to join the less well paid, less prestigious auxilia, and were rewarded on retirement after 25 years’ service (assuming...
Raphael Samuel set out his stall as a practitioner of ‘people’s history’. This was a capacious category: it could be liberal, radical, nationalist or socialist; macro or microhistorical.
The unmistakable – and powerful – stereotype of the ‘good Italian’ permeates the perception of Italian behaviour in the 20th century, especially in wartime, both within and outside Italy.