The ninth of the Crowns of the Martyrs by Prudentius, the great Christian poet of the fifth century, tells of his visit to the tomb in Rome of Cassian of Imola. Above the tomb hung a grisly...
As the Soviet tanks drew closer, the East Prussian aristocracy took charge of ‘their people’ for the last time. In the bitter winter of 1945, ignoring Nazi orders to stand firm, they...
The breadfruit is native to a number of Pacific islands, and is nowadays grown more widely in the tropics. It has never become a global commodity in the same way as other exotic foodstuffs...
In March 1896, an Italian colonial army was defeated near the town of Adwa in northern Ethiopia. It was not the first reverse suffered by a European army in Africa, but it was the first decisive...
For nearly six decades, the figure of George Kennan has loomed over US foreign policy. Long before his death in 2005, at the age of 101, he had become a professional wise man: institutes and...
Either the bullet hit the president in the back, came out of his neck, then struck the governor in the armpit, came out below his right nipple, went through his wrist, lodged in his thigh, and...
The socioeconomic arrangement that emerged from the turmoil of the 1970s is faltering.
British imperialism may have been oversold. Anti-imperialists tend to blame it for most of the problems of the modern world; a rather smaller band of apologists credits it with spreading...
On 18 October 1881, Crown Prince Frederick William of Germany and Prussia marked his 50th birthday with a gloomy entry in his diary. He had been waiting to succeed to the throne for twenty years...
Societies, it is sometimes said, get the politics they deserve. Can the same be said for their history? If contemporary Britain is anything to go by then the short answer is probably yes....
The positive claims of Ginzburg’s micro-history rest on the power of the anomaly.
The Emperor Caligula offers another case of the King Canute problem.
You can’t choose whether or not to have siblings. Many children would change their situation, if they could. Some long for company, others are bent on ridding themselves of rivals. But the...
My relations with Tony Judt date back a long time but they were curiously contradictory.
Leonardo da Vinci is seldom out of the news. The story of 2011 was the Salvator Mundi, a serene and ringletted image of Christ formerly considered the work of a pupil or imitator, but now –...
In a chapter on animals in his Description of England, the Elizabethan antiquary William Harrison told not one but two stories about Henry VII. ‘As the report goeth’, he wrote, the...
There is nothing novel about British forces being involved in Afghanistan. Britain was deeply concerned with Afghanistan from the early 19th century right up until the moment it relinquished its...
Bordeaux is a fussy city, it’s sometimes said, overinvested in the wine trade, with a high opinion of itself; but that’s not my impression. Three years ago we began renting an...