History
In the garden of good and evil: the power of the poppy
America has for years been struggling with a shortage of the drugs it uses to execute people, yet it was…
Just a man: Demystifying Napoleon
Who says that the ‘great man’ theory of history is dead? Following hard on the heels of Andrew Roberts’s magnificent…
Stitches in time: The history of the world through the eye of a needle
I recently read a book in which the author, describing rural life in the early 19th century, casually mentioned clothing…
A date with Venus in Tahiti
There is something about the Transit of Venus that touches the imagination in ways that are not all to do…
John Lilburne: champion of liberty and born belligerent
John Lilburne was only 43 when he died in 1657, an early death even for the time. But in many…
Why is it that so many leading Brexiteers studied history?
What do Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Dominic Cummings all have in common? They are Brexiteers, of course. Yet little…
2018: a year of dangerous liaisons with Russia
First it was McMafia. After which it was the Skripals. Then the World Cup. Come the end of the year…
The artist who breathes Technicolour life into historic photographs
There is something of The Wizard of Oz about Marina Amaral’s photographs. She whisks us from black-and-white Kansas to shimmering…
Russia’s obsession with securing a warm-water port changed the history of Central Asia
In the 13th century, having overrun and terrorised Europe as far as Budapest, and in the process possibly bringing with…
The cruel end of Emmanuel Barthélemy –as a waxwork in the Chamber of Horrors
This is a biography that begins with a bang, swiftly followed by puddles of blood, shrieks of ‘Murder!’ and a…
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,…
