Book review – History
Carnage on the home front: revisiting a forgotten disaster of the first world war
Philip Hensher on a little-known episode of first world war history when a munitions factory in Kent exploded in April 1916, claiming over 100 lives
Bicycling: the Marmite means of transport
Bicycles — in Britain, anyway — are the Marmite means of transport. I am among the bicycle-lovers, almost religious and…
The Ottoman empire: the last great casualty of the first world war
In a possibly apocryphal story, Henry Kissinger, while visiting Beijing in 1972 as Nixon’s national security adviser, asked Zhou Enlai,…
John Knox: like the blast of 500 trumpets
John Knox, Cranmer complained, was ‘one of those unquiet spirits, which can like nothing but that is after their own…
Americans and their gun culture: attached at the hip
Like the documentary journalist Iain Overton, author of this book, I was taught to shoot and maintain a gun as…
At last: a calm, definitive account of the Armenian genocide
The atrocities suffered by an estimated one million Armenians in 1915 have been largely ignored by historians and officially denied by the Turks. It’s a centenary we can’t afford to neglect, says Justin Marozzi
Paying and praying: economics determined theology in the early Christian church
Peter Brown’s explorations of the mindsets of late antiquity have been educating us for nearly half a century, ever since…
As deadly as the male: female Russian pilots of the second world war were femmes fatales in every sense
The name Lyuba Vinogradova may not ring any bells, but her ferrety eye for spotting a telling detail may already…
A rebellion among Rugby schoolboys proved perfect training for its ringleader in putting down a Jamaican slave-rising in later life
The public schools ought to have gone out of business long ago. The Education Act of 1944, which promised ‘state-aided…
The knives come out of the cabinet in Churchill’s wartime government
Coalitions, as David Cameron has discovered, are tricky things to manage. How much more difficult, then, was it for Winston…
Baiting the trap with CHEESE: how we fooled the Germans in the second world war
Second world war deception operations are now widely known, particularly those which misled the Germans into thinking that the D-Day…
Dickens’s dark side: walking at night helped ease his conscience at killing off characters
James McConnachie discovers that some of the greatest English writers — Chaucer, Blake, Dickens, Wordsworth, Dr Johnson — drew inspiration and even comfort from walking around London late at night
Sex, rebellion, ambition, prejudice: the story of 1950s women has it all
Although the young women of the 1950s hovered on the cusp of change, many did not know it. Valerie Gisborn…
2,500 years of gyms (and you’re still better off walking the dog)
My favourite fact about gyms before reading this book was that the average British gym member covers 468 miles per…
Murder in the dunes: the ‘26 Martyrs’ of Baku and the making of a Soviet legend
In the pre-dawn hours of 20 September 1918, a train, its headlamp off, heading eastwards out of Kransnovodsk on the…
The madness of Nazism laid bare
‘If the war is lost, then it is of no concern to me if the people perish in it.’ Bruno…
The low sculduggery of high Victorian finance
The whole idea of capitalism, according to Enlightenment philosophers, was that it created a positive spiral of moral behaviour. ‘Concern…
From prince to pauper: a dramatic overview of Britain on 18 June 1815
Of all the big battalions of books marking the bicentenary of the battle of Waterloo that have come my way,…
The greatest American Arctic disaster
In the course of the 19th century, various flotillas of expeditions hastened to the polar regions in little wooden ships…
The merry monarch and his mistresses; was sex for Charles II a dangerous distraction?
In a tone of breezy bravado in keeping with their concept of their subject’s character, Don Jordan and Michael Walsh…
Process of elimination: the horrors of Ravensbrück revealed
Concentration camps in Nazi Germany were originally set up in 1933 to terrorise Hitler’s political enemies; as war drew near,…
A window on Chaucer’s cramped, scary, smelly world
Sam Leith describes the frequently lonely, squalid and hapless life of the father of English poetry
William Marshal: kingmaker — or just king of the joust?
In February 1861 a 21-year-old French medievalist called Paul Meyer walked into Sotheby’s auction house near Covent Garden. He had…
The turbulent reign of King Cotton: the dark history of one of the world’s most important commodities
If not for cotton, we would still be wearing wool. To equal current cotton production, we would need seven billion…
Game of thrones: five kings spanning five centuries launch a new series on royalty
Nigel Jones reviews the first five titles to appear in a new series on British monarchs
