The quatercentenary commemorative King James Bible (KJB) sits on my desk as I write: a satisfying artefact in its chocolate livery enriched by opulently gilded top, tail and fore edges, with...
At the end of last year it was reported that in the late 1990s Hashim Thaci, the prime minister of Kosovo, together with other Kosovo Albanian political leaders, had traded in the organs of Serb...
‘The Russians have everything in name, and nothing in reality,’ the Marquis de Custine observed in 1839, comparing the empire to a blank book with a magnificent table of contents....
The Kalashnikov automatic rifle is light, portable and cheap. It scarcely ever jams, even in the most extreme conditions – tropical heat, Arctic cold, bogs, deserts. It can be disassembled...
‘Is it your idea, then, that I should live with you as your mistress – since I can’t be your wife?’ Ellen Olenska asks of Newland Archer in Edith Wharton’s The Age...
The researcher starts out with fieldwork data from a village or set of villages, or material from a set of archives, or even a set of conversations between friends in a pub, and then proceeds to...
It’s illegal to drive while you’re on your mobile phone, so why do galleries ask you to listen on headsets while you look at pictures? There is plenty of evidence – intuitive,...
I can’t be the only person who remembers the 1970s in Britain as a prolonged downpour with a single burst of sunshine. There were 55 million people living here, but on certain days, walking...
Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, gathers secret intelligence electronically rather than through spies: ‘sigint’ as opposed to ‘humint’. (There is also...
Last July David Cameron announced a judicial inquiry into Britain’s alleged participation in acts of torture and rendition in the years since 9/11, though he also said that it...
Archimedes, the most famous mathematician of classical antiquity, was killed in 212 BC, as a small piece of collateral damage in the Roman sack of the Greek city of Syracuse. Syracuse itself was...
‘Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?’ Adolf Hitler asked his generals in 1939, as he told them to ‘close your hearts to pity,’ ‘act...
Bruce Sterling’s 1998 political thriller, Distraction, is set in the year 2044, and roving bands of land-based pirates have taken over the American hinterlands, swamps and roadways, armed...
In 1779, a Scottish doctor called William Alexander published a two-volume History of Women. Alexander was a man of the Enlightenment who regarded politeness to women as a mark of civilisation....
A voyeuristic pleasure in being privy to secrets drives many archival historians. After ploughing through bundles of faded letters reporting on wills and the weather, pigs and piles, what...
On 15 September, the eve of Mexico’s bicentenary, President Felipe Calderón threw the country a $3 billion birthday party. An hour before midnight, he took the tricoloured flag from...
Nowadays, when Palestinian activists in their twenties and thirties meet up with veterans of the Palestinian struggle, they show an unexpected thoughtfulness towards the older, revolutionary...
Alfred Hitchcock’s Rich and Strange (1931) includes a quietly compelling scene set on a Tube train packed with office-weary commuters. The dim and sluggish hero finds himself standing next...