The last year of the workhouse was 1929. The old-age pension, introduced twenty years earlier, was still only ten shillings a week. George Orwell hadn’t imagined that anyone could live on...
after Nonnus I Her only home was here in this forest, among the high rocks, sending her long arrows in flight through the standing pines as if threading nets in the air. She’d never seen a...
If you look at books published in the years between 1944 and 1963 – books like An American Dilemma, The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Power Elite, The Organisation Man, The Feminine...
In February 1924, four months before George Mallory and Sandy Irvine died on Everest, Conrad published a short essay called ‘Geography and Some Explorers’. He distinguished between...
Nigeria, at independence from British rule in 1960, was called the Giant of Africa. With a large population, an educated elite and many natural resources, especially oil, Nigeria was supposed to...
One of the first things the Germans did after marching into Greece in 1941 was to resume the excavations that had been interrupted by the onset of war. Each sector of the military pitched in: the...
It took sixty years for the supporters of Crossrail, the new railway being built under London, to convince Parliament it was worth the investment. Recession scuppered the project twice, in the...
During the first 19 years of Israel’s statehood, its leaders gave little thought to the Palestinian question. Two-thirds of the Palestinians were driven out in 1948; those who remained were...
Amativeness was the cause of Isabella Robinson's disgrace: Soon after they met in Edinburgh, Combe examined Isabella’s skull. He informed her that she had an unusually large cerebellum, an...
Jean Suret-Canale, or Suret as everyone called him, was one of the finest Marxist historians and geographers of the last century. A pioneering Africanist, his books on Francophone Africa were...
A decade ago, digging through a physicist’s archive, I stumbled on a document that has haunted me ever since: a hand-typed table of integrals seemingly little different from the ones...
The one thing most Europeans know about Belarus is that it has the most repressive political system and the most authoritarian ruler in Europe. The country’s parliamentary elections on 23...
My grandfather, Henry Cockburn, resigned prematurely from the Foreign Office at the age of 49, shortly before the First World War. He was the senior British diplomat in Seoul and resigned, my...
A new form of colonialism was born in the second half of the 19th century, largely in response to the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Of its many theorists by far the most influential was Henry Maine, a...
Working out how to handle a figure as mercurial as Casement should have come naturally to Vargas Llosa.
Living originalism? The heart sinks. Is this going to resemble a treatise on secular spirituality or tabloid ethics or some other well-meant oxymoron? To a degree, the despondency is justified....
The geeks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are fond of merry japes, locally known as ‘hacks’. One of the more memorable happened one night in October 1958 when an MIT...
Tottenham Hotspur was the first football club to be floated, in 1983. I asked the FA why it had allowed Spurs to form a holding company. It hadn’t been an issue, I was told. The top clubs’ appetite...