‘Unless we can recognise the affinities as well as the differences in our studies of other societies, it is hard to explain why anyone should pay or be paid for studying them.’ You...
In the run-up to the EU referendum, the Leave campaign has struggled to win the argument about jobs, prosperity, the value of the pound in your pocket and world peace, but has felt on safer...
In 1811, at the age of 26, Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau inherited the estate of Muskau (nearly 200 square miles in size, annexed to Saxony in 1806 but allotted to Prussia by the...
Hitler did in fact have a private life, although a pretty boring one, and did have friends, most of them married couples where the wife would mother Adolf, feed him cream cakes and be rewarded with displays...
In England 1381 was the year of what has often been called the Peasants’ Revolt. The insurgency began in Essex in late May, spread quickly to Kent and on 13 June the rebels gathered on...
In March 1932, Thomas Mann visited Weimar in central Germany. For the last thirty years of the 18th century, this modestly sized town was home to Goethe, Schiller, Herder and Wieland, but by...
At this year’s International Book Fair in Cairo, I met a bookseller who promised me he had a full run of a 15-part early 20th-century Arabic translation of a work by Michel...
The Conservative politician Airey Neave was a man whose life touched many bases. A Second World War veteran who became a close friend and ally of Margaret Thatcher, he was killed by Irish...
Milovan Djilas was second only to Tito in the communist hierarchy of postwar Yugoslavia. In the war years, he had gained a reputation as a warrior-intellectual who could think dialectically...
On 16 March 1810 a Mrs Martin, a ‘labourer’s wife’, was working a field near Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon when she turned up an old gold signet ring bearing on...
‘It was the common man, after all, who was doing all the dirty work in the war and the army. He deserved a fanfare.’ This is how Aaron Copland explained his Fanfare for the Common...
Two political forces dominated post-Liberation France: Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French, and the French Communist Party (PCF), at that point the biggest and most popular party in the country.
Who invented English literature? As good a claimant as any is the London bookseller Jacob Tonson (1656–1736), who dominated the publishing business of his day and died a landed gentleman worth a reported...
The railways may, as Simon Bradley writes, be ‘a uniquely discrete system: a physically separate domain ruled by their own mysterious rhythms and laws’, but you seldom hear ‘I love the railways,’...
That British Vogue has reached its hundredth year is no surprise when one looks at its record. Readership figures have always been strong; above 100,000 for most of its existence.
Heaney was not in any simple sense a ‘Virgilian’ poet, but the sixth book of Virgil’s Aeneid mattered more to his later writing than any other single text.
Virginia Woolf’s body was still undiscovered, lodged under Southease Bridge, when Margot Asquith, approaching eighty, published her personal tribute in the Times. The two women had been...
‘Those who make many species are the “splitters” and those who make few are the “lumpers”,’ Charles Darwin wrote in 1857 to his friend, the great botanist...