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...
What happened on Easter Monday in Dublin is open to interpretation. As a military event, it makes almost no sense. Was it meant to have resonance rather than resolution?
No one at Oxford, or anywhere else in the UK, talked much about Cecil Rhodes before the protests began. Portraits and statues of dead white men are like air in Oxford, ubiquitous and generally unremarked....
Before the First World War, the European high aristocracy roamed freely across the continent, taking the waters at Baden-Baden, sampling the sea air at Biarritz, shooting partridge and...
Early this month Sotheby’s held a champagne-and-canape viewing for the sale of possessions of the late ‘Debo’, Duchess of Devonshire. The lots were arranged to suggest room...
The early entries in Jean Lucey Pratt’s journals brought to mind Cecily’s diary in The Importance of Being Earnest, where Wilde sends up, among other things, the predictable script...
Henry VIII came to the throne in 1509. Charles Brandon’s power as a court favourite endured till death removed him in 1545. How did he do it?
‘He was the greatest man since the Deluge.’ This assessment of Alexander von Humboldt by King Frederick William IV of Prussia, which Andrea Wulf quotes in her fine new biography,...
On 18 May 1961, towards the end of Session 45 of the Eichmann trial, Judge Halevi asked State Prosecutor Bar-Or if he’d finished submitting into evidence all the documents relevant to...