The single currency has turned into a monetary choke-lead, forcing a swathe of economies – more than half the Eurozone’s population – into perpetual recession.
In 545 BCE – immediately after the conquest of Lydia by Cyrus, the aggressive and imperially expansive young king of Persia – the Greeks of Asia Minor, who had previously lived under...
The history of ballooning is inescapably a procession of failures. This is partly in the nature of balloon flight which, like politics and indeed life, must always end with a falling to earth, at...
The General Strike isn’t remembered as one of the labour movement’s great failures, but as a crisis that failed to happen, or even as the moment when Britain faced the prospect of revolution and turned...
Say this city has ten million souls, Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes: Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us. ‘Refugee...
On 11 May 1831, a fastidious 25-year-old Norman aristocrat arrived in New York City with an assignment to report on American prisons for the French Ministry of Justice. Over the next nine months...
This book is preceded by two two-volume books that have been praised by journalists to the skies. They belong to a grand design, to a project set to tell the story of modern Britain (modern...
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:...