When Marie-Antoinette couldn’t sleep, she would ring for a lady-in-waiting to come and read to her; a rota of lectrices was on call at Versailles at any time of day or night; before...
The notion that toil, ability and ambition might be enough in themselves to propel the humblest of citizens from log cabin to White House is a vital ingredient in the American Dream. Indeed,...
Lampy, just a couple of inches tall, is the last of his tribe, and is now immured in a glass cabinet a long way from his German homeland. He was one of the porcelain Gnomen-Figuren brought to...
For Europeans of a liberal disposition, the Code Napoléon was a call to modernise not merely the law but society in its entirety.
After the Islamic State astonished its enemies by sweeping through Iraq’s second city, Mosul, the self-proclaimed caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, appeared in a mosque to give a victory...
When I imagine the Greek gods on Olympus I conjure up a lofty polished marble palace with colonnades and porticos open to the air, its Ionic and Corinthian capitals picked out in gold, rather...
Twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, two major exhibitions in London take stock of German identity, history and memory, each in its own way providing a powerful reminder of the...
In 1802, the young Humphry Davy introduced his first full course of chemistry lectures at the Royal Institution by addressing the fear that science was a Trojan horse for social or political...
Familiarity, oddly enough, is all too often an obstacle to historical understanding. The more we think we know about a period, the more preconceptions we have. In the case of the Napoleonic...
The fifth volume of the Cambridge Ancient History, covering the fifth century bc, was first published in 1927. The League of Nations still mattered, the exploits of T.E. Lawrence were a...
Who would not want to wear a uniform with a Sam Browne belt from the cavalry days and a pair of wings on the left breast?
The history of paganism in Britain spans more than thirty thousand years, almost the whole time that humans have inhabited these islands, bar a few state-enforced Christian centuries in the...
The English have always had an affection for wayward, idiosyncratic types, men and women who, like Dickens’s eccentrics, acknowledge no law beyond themselves. This is one reason they...
In the spring of 1949 Klaus Mann moved from hotel room to hotel room in Amsterdam and Cannes, contemplating suicide. He was isolated and depressed and sure that the situation in postwar...
When war came to Sarajevo in 1992 almost the only thing about the city known to the aid workers and journalists who made their way there was that it was the place where a Bosnian Serb assassin...
In 2006, when Baghdad was mired in sectarian killings and the murder rate was more than a thousand a month, Justin Marozzi spoke to Donny George, the director of the National Museum of Iraq,...
Africa, it’s said, is the mother of modern civilisation, but it’s probably more accurate to say that Congo is.
Hitchcock’s comedy thriller The 39 Steps, first released in June 1935, has become a ‘classic’. But it’s also a film of its moment, or more precisely of the difference...