History
The best single-volume history of the Great War yet written
The historiography of the Great War is stupendous, the effects of the conflict being so far-reaching that even today historians…
The splendour and squalor surrounding the Sun King
The château at Versailles remained the grandest palace in the whole of Europe from the moment that Louis XIV established…
Why are there no pubs called after Lord North?
If you associate Lord Salisbury more with a pub than with politics, here is Andrew Gimson to the rescue, with…
For some soldiers, the VC was easier to win than to wear
‘The Victoria Cross,’ gushed a mid-19th-century contributor to the Art Journal, ‘is thoroughly English in every particular. Given alike to…
Why do people risk their lives to fight for a foreign cause?
What’s the point of a cover if not to judge a book by? One look at the image on the…
Did a vodka ban precipitate the Russian Revolution?
It’s one of the more mysterious features of human history that people of every era and in almost every place…
The vibrant tradition of English folk song
After hundreds of densely packed pages on folk song in England — a subject for which I share Steve Roud’s…
How cool is your fridge?
Mrs Thatcher once explained that she adored cleaning the fridge because, in a complicated life, it was one of the…
Reading Norman Davies’s global history is like wading through porridge
For many of us, life has become global. Areas which were previously tranquil backwaters are now hives of international activity.…
Why has there never been a hit musical about the history of Britain?
Americans may be able to draw on only 250 years of history, but they’re not shy of making a song…
From blissful dawn to bleak despair: the end of the revolutionary dream
Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey were undergraduates when they met in June 1794, Coleridge at Cambridge university and Southey…
Broken dreams
In the expensive realm of musical comedy, it’s impossible to predict what will take off and what will crash and…
The magic of maths
It’s odd, when you think about it, that mathematics ever got going. We have no innate genius for numbers. Drop…
Pleasure palaces and hidden gems
Theatre buildings are seriously interesting – as I ought to have appreciated sooner in the course of 25 years writing…
Mozart’s mischievous muse
If you were to compare Mozart to a bird it wouldn’t be the starling. Possibly the wood thrush or nightingale,…
Flights of fancy
Levitation. We all know what it is: the ‘disregard for gravity’, as Peter Adey puts it in his new book,…
Wool, wheat and wet weather
Englishness is big business in the nation of shopkeepers, and not just in politics and tourism. In literature, the gypsy…
… and an awesome beak
The Enigma of Kidson is a quintessentially Etonian book: narcissistic, complacent, a bit silly and ultimately beguiling. It is the…
Out of sorts at the RSC
The RSC’s summer blockbuster is about Queen Anne. It’s called Queen Anne. It opens at the Inns of Court where…
Could vice-president Mike Pence be the most powerful man in America?
Let’s take stock. Donald Trump, until last week, had never done a government job or held an elected office. He…
1916: Sorry, President Wilson, but this is not a gentlemanly war
From ‘President Wilson and the Lessons of History’, 2 June 1916: Emphatically it is not a war of what we…
Warning: there’s a plague of fake blue plaques
One of the great distinctions and pleasures of British life has been devalued by cheap imitations
The saddest, most romantic view in Britain
Is there a more forlornly romantic spot in Britain than the moors east of Inverness where the Jacobite dream died?…
BBC1’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream seems deliberately designed to flush out purists
Spoiler alerts aren’t normally required for reviews of Shakespeare — but perhaps I’d better issue one before saying that in…
Beautiful, wilful, never dull: in praise of Clumber spaniels
For the first time in more than 30 years we have no Clumber spaniel. We have had five: Henry, Judith,…
