David Crane

How ever did the inbred Habsburgs control their vast empire?

16 March 2024 9:00 am

For centuries, a line of mentally retarded monarchs managed extraordinary feats of engineering across the world against all odds

The Hundred Years War ends in England’s agonising defeat – but triumph for Jonathan Sumption

26 August 2023 9:00 am

England’s final, agonising defeat in the Hundred Years War brings Jonathan Sumption’s monumental history to a close. David Crane salutes 43 years of research and writing

The Franco-Prussian war changed the map of Europe – so why are we so ignorant about it?

17 June 2023 9:00 am

Rachel Chrastil describes how Bismarck, relying on Gallic pride to provoke the war he wanted, ensured that France would fight without a single ally

Failing to denigrate Britain’s entire colonial record has become a heinous crime

18 February 2023 9:00 am

Any mention of imperialism’s benefits is now considered morally reprehensible, as the furore over Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism shows

The history of the world in bloodshed and megalomania

12 November 2022 9:00 am

It is hard to imagine why anyone should want to write one, but if there has to be a history…

Straight lines and grandiose schemes — Napoleon the gardener

8 May 2021 9:00 am

Not content with imposing his will on nations, Napoleon tried to subdue nature too, says David Crane

Up close and personal: voices from the Great War, week by week

27 February 2021 9:00 am

As the Great War unfolds, voices we don’t usually hear describe with a terrible raw honesty the realities of their experience, says David Crane

Holding the Empire responsible for the state of modern Britain is becoming commonplace

30 January 2021 9:00 am

It seems to have become a virtual orthodoxy of the academic and publishing worlds that history and fiction now have…

Is Indian cricket no longer cricket?

9 January 2021 9:00 am

There is nothing in world sport, ‘nothing in the history of the human race’, Ramachandra Guha modestly reckons, that can…

Vain, inbred and inept: how could the Habsburgs have survived so long?

16 May 2020 9:00 am

One of the great mysteries of European history is how for the best part of 700 years a family who…

Is there no field in which the Jewish mindset doesn’t excel?

26 October 2019 9:00 am

More than 20 years ago, George Steiner, meditating on 2,000 years of persecution and suffering, posed the ‘taboo’ question that…

Homage to Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman Emperor

10 August 2019 9:00 am

It is not often that a book’s blurb gives any idea of what’s inside, but Helen Castor’s endorsement — ‘a…

The glory and the misery of Louis XIV’s France

6 July 2019 9:00 am

I was flicking through an old copy of The Spectator the other day, one of the issues containing contributors’ ‘Christmas…

Has Daisy Dunn chosen the wrong Pliny to write about?

15 June 2019 9:00 am

I couldn’t help thinking, as I read this book, of an old story, vaguely recalled from English A-level classes, about…

The Porte des Allemands in Metz, where France meets Germany and Luxembourg

Lotharingia: Charlemagne’s much disputed legacy

9 March 2019 9:00 am

In 1919, only months after the end of the Great War, a French airman called Jacques Trolley de Prevaux, accompanied…

In August 1819, the cavalry charged a crowd of 60,000 in Manchester who had gathered to demand parliamentary reform

‘The reality was disgusting’: Peter Ackroyd slams Victorian Britain

15 September 2018 9:00 am

‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times… it was the epoch of belief, it was…

Replica of The Endeavour

A date with Venus in Tahiti

1 September 2018 9:00 am

There is something about the Transit of Venus that touches the imagination in ways that are not all to do…

Sunset on the Clyde, 1984. The massive cranes used to build the Lusitania, HMS Hood, the Queen Mary and the QE2 are relics of the once great maritime industry of Port Glasgow

Historian David Edgerton says the ‘British nation’ lasted from 1945 to 1979, the miner’s strike its death knell

7 July 2018 9:00 am

It seems somehow symptomatic of David Edgerton’s style as a historian, of a certain wilful singularity, that even his book’s…

Napoleon at the Battle of Austerlitz by François Gérard

Napoleon’s dazzling victories invited a devastating backlash

10 March 2018 9:00 am

On 20 July 1805, just three months before the battle of Trafalgar destroyed a combined French and Spanish fleet, the…

Portrait of Queen Caroline by Joseph Highmore, c.1735

Caroline of Ansbach: the best of the Hanoverians

25 November 2017 9:00 am

It can sometimes seem — unfairly but irresistibly — as if the sole function of the myriad Lilliputian German statelets…

Benjamin Lay (American School, 18th century)

Raising Cain

16 September 2017 9:00 am

It is a pretty safe bet that for every 1,000 people who know of William Wilberforce, no more than the…

A depiction of the martyred Edmund Campion

When English Catholics were considered as dangerous as jihadis

24 October 2015 9:00 am

Martyrdom, these days, does not get a good press. Fifty years ago English Catholics could take a ghoulish pride in…

The forgotten army: abandoned by the British to the horrors of Partition

13 June 2015 9:00 am

It is often said that cricket was ‘a game invented by the English and played by Indians’, and every so…

Isaak Israelevich Brodsky’s depiction of the execution of the ‘26 Martyrs’, painted in 1925 and already the stuff of Soviet legend

Murder in the dunes: the ‘26 Martyrs’ of Baku and the making of a Soviet legend

21 February 2015 9:00 am

In the pre-dawn hours of 20 September 1918, a train, its headlamp off, heading eastwards out of Kransnovodsk on the…

William Marshal: kingmaker — or just king of the joust?

17 January 2015 9:00 am

In February 1861 a 21-year-old French medievalist called Paul Meyer walked into Sotheby’s auction house near Covent Garden. He had…