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...
In the spring of 1965, on the road between Memphis and Hollywood, desert plains all around, his bloodstream torqued by a tinnital static of prescription ups and downs, Elvis Presley finally broke down.
There is an old Pathé News clip of Attlee being interviewed on the stump in 1950. He has so little to say that the interviewer, in some desperation, asks, ‘Have you anything to...
The political commentator Iain Martin, who claims that he fled Scotland before the 2007 Scottish elections rather than live under an SNP-led government, wrote a few months ago in a blog for...
The Christians’ Disneylands of architectural extravaganzas might be filled with colourful and thrilling, terrifying or sentimental images of Jesus and Mary and the saints, but these were not, they explained,...
I had just seen a man about his headaches and was about to call someone about her backache when the receptionist beckoned me over. ‘Mrs Lagnari is on the phone,’ she mouthed...
The birth of Prince George obviates the immediate need for the Succession to the Crown Act 2013 which introduced gender equality into the line of succession. Section 2 of the Act addresses,...
Is it not a prettie thing to carry Wife, Mayde, and Widdow in your pocket, when you may as it were conferre and heare them talke togither when you will? Nay more, drinke togither: yea, and that...
The secret beating heart of the dream office is the stationery cupboard, the ideal kind, the one that opens to enough depth to allow you to walk in and close the door behind you.
It’s well known now that contact with British settlers in the early 19th century led to the extinction of the native Tasmanians; it was pretty well known at the time too. But much about...