Take a bullet for the team: The Profumo Affair

David Runciman, 21 February 2013

Britain in the early 1960s was a divided country, torn by conflicting impulses, towards the past and the future, tradition and experimentation, dignity and fun.

Read more about Take a bullet for the team: The Profumo Affair

Royal Bodies

Hilary Mantel, 21 February 2013

Our current royal family doesn’t have the difficulties in breeding that pandas do, but pandas and royal persons alike are expensive to conserve and ill-adapted to any modern environment.

Read more about Royal Bodies

Small nations, take heed: Hanoi’s War

Andrew Bacevich, 7 February 2013

Does the Cold War date from 1946 when Winston Churchill delivered his Iron Curtain speech? Or had it begun decades earlier, when Churchill sought through armed intervention to strangle the...

Read more about Small nations, take heed: Hanoi’s War

Kisses for the Duce: Letters to Mussolini

Richard J. Evans, 7 February 2013

In Italy, serious public criticism of Mussolini has become increasingly rare. ‘Mussolini,’ Berlusconi told the Spectator in 2003, ‘never killed anyone.’

Read more about Kisses for the Duce: Letters to Mussolini

‘For God’s sake bring me a large Scotch. What a bloody awful country.’ Visiting Northern Ireland as home secretary in 1970, Reginald Maudling, whose mellow moderation verged on...

Read more about On the Window Ledge of the Union: Loyalism v. Unionism

Venice-on-Thames: Vauxhall Gardens

Amanda Vickery, 7 February 2013

Eighteenth-century historians can’t get enough of pleasure gardens. They seem to crystallise the new and distinctive features of Georgian society and culture in one fabulous setting. As...

Read more about Venice-on-Thames: Vauxhall Gardens

New World Chaos

Rodric Braithwaite, 24 January 2013

Mark Mazower has written many elegant but gloomy books about the unending capacity of the Europeans to destroy one another. His new book is elegant, perceptive, stimulating and erudite. It deals...

Read more about New World Chaos

Who gets the dacha? Marshal Zhukov

Sheila Fitzpatrick, 24 January 2013

Of the Soviet Union’s World War Two military leaders, Marshal Zhukov was the most celebrated, both at home and in the West. Broad-faced, stocky, plain-spoken with a touch of swagger, Georgy...

Read more about Who gets the dacha? Marshal Zhukov

Even before the ship sank the century of progress was pregnant with the Titanic’s fate.

Read more about Why name a ship after a defeated race? New Lives of the ‘Titanic’

Banter about Dildoes: Roman Shopping

Mary Beard, 3 January 2013

The most memorable account of an ancient shopping expedition is found in some comic verses by the third-century BC poet Herodas.

Read more about Banter about Dildoes: Roman Shopping

In a Box

Deborah Friedell, 3 January 2013

George Washington’s last words to his physician were ‘do not let my body be put into the vault in less than two days after I am dead.’ That wouldn’t have been enough for...

Read more about In a Box

In High Stalinist Times: High Stalinist Times

Neal Ascherson, 20 December 2012

Anne Applebaum’s book begins with one group of women in the Polish city of Lodz and ends with another. The 45 years between the end of the Second World War and the emergence of a free,...

Read more about In High Stalinist Times: High Stalinist Times

Both these books, in very different ways, are founded on what we experience when we frequent wild country – sometimes virgin, more often partially domesticated. We leave our prints on it,...

Read more about Dykes, Drongs, Sarns, Snickets: Walking England

Don’t be a braying ass: Callimachus

Peter Green, 20 December 2012

Recent comparisons of the Hellenistic Age with our own fragmented culture may have persuaded at least some curious readers to dip into Theocritus, Polybius or Apollonius Rhodius. Yet how many...

Read more about Don’t be a braying ass: Callimachus

Perfidy, Villainy, Intrigue: The Black Hole

Ramachandra Guha, 20 December 2012

In 1931, Gandhi visited England to discuss India’s political future. In a speech at Oxford, he hoped that when the empire finally ended, India would be an ‘equal partner with Britain,...

Read more about Perfidy, Villainy, Intrigue: The Black Hole

He fights with flashing weapons: Thomas Wyatt

Katherine Rundell, 6 December 2012

Before Anne Boleyn laid her head on the executioner’s block, she bent and wrapped the hem of her dress around her feet. She thereby ensured that, if in her death throes she were to...

Read more about He fights with flashing weapons: Thomas Wyatt

Tyranny of the Ladle: Mao’s Great Famine

James C. Scott, 6 December 2012

There is no doubt that the Great Leap Famine in China more than half a century ago was the worst man-made calamity of modern times. Between early 1958 and the spring of 1961, somewhere between 30...

Read more about Tyranny of the Ladle: Mao’s Great Famine

Everybody’s Joan

Marina Warner, 6 December 2012

In 1954, I was a pupil at Les Dames de Marie, a French-speaking convent school in an expansive and pastoral suburb of Brussels. Every morning, as we crocodile-filed into our classrooms, we sang...

Read more about Everybody’s Joan