Philip II
Friend of Elizabethan exiles: the colourful life of Jane Dormer
Thomas Cromwell’s biographer Diarmaid MacCulloch once told me that my father’s family, the Dormers, had been servants of the great…
Spain’s golden age — with a silver lining
As every schoolboy knows, ‘the empire on which the sun never set’ was British, and ‘blue-blooded’ was a phrase applied…
Climate change, Bruegel-style
The world depicted by the Flemish master is not so different from our own, says Martin Gayford
In the empire stakes, the Anglo-Saxons were for long Spain’s inferiors
‘Every schoolboy knows who imprisoned Montezuma and who strangled Atahualpa.’ Macaulay, anticipating Gove, was complaining that the schoolboys by contrast…
