I have plenty of good friends among the Italians who warn me not to eat and drink with their painters. Many of the painters are my enemies, and they copy my work in the churches and wherever...
Impatient with the dissension and indecision – and the fruitlessness – of the suffrage movement, Emily Davison went it alone, mischievously, daringly.
At midnight on the eve of a hanging day or ‘hanging fair’, usually a Monday, the bellman of St Sepulchre-without-Newgate recited these verses to the men and women due to be executed: ...
The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of...
At first glance, Demosthenes, the leading politician of ancient Athens in the era of its decline, would seem an ideal subject for a biography. Dozens of his speeches survive, a huge corpus...
The Eclair was a British steam sloop charged with policing the slave trade. In November 1844 she set out hopefully in a naval squadron for Sierra Leone, where she spent five months patrolling for...
Dickens complained that ghosts ‘have little originality, and “walk” in a beaten track’. They are reducible, he said, ‘to a very few general types’: the...
Britons on the home front in the Second World War bore the sacrifices the war imposed on them without too much complaint. In particular they accepted the need for market controls and rationing,...
The Latin textbook we used at school in the mid-1970s was proud of its new approach. It introduced us to a Roman family whose lives were meant to look just as ours would have done if only...
Early modern Europe was awash with cases of demonic possession. Thousands of men, women and children conversed in languages of which they had no knowledge, tore at their own flesh and uttered...
‘I wonder if a single thought that has helped forward the human spirit has ever been conceived or written down in an enormous room.’ It’s one of the great historical putdowns:...
Four years after the killing of between eight and ten thousand Tamils by the Sri Lankan army, which brought to an end a civil war that had lasted for 26 years, there is trouble on the island...
George Berkeley’s claim that things exist only when they are being perceived has a lot to do with his Irishness. There are Irish people nowadays who cross the street when they see a priest...
The Iranian Revolution was a revolt against Western-imposed modernisation in favour of an enchanted path to modernity.
The New Deal was fracturing, but the impetus behind it was far from over. One of the distinctive features of Ira Katznelson’s book is that he sees the New Deal period as extending well beyond the 1930s....
‘The magnitude of the problem is such as to cause the heart to sink,’ a member of the Fabian Society wrote in 1943, contemplating the hordes of uprooted people who would need...
For centuries, the region that now straddles northern Angola and the western part of the Democratic Republic of Congo formed a political and cultural whole. South of what the BaKongo knew as the...
By the time I’d read no more than a third of The Creation of Inequality I would have willingly knelt before the authors to touch my nose against their knees and announce: ‘I eat your...