STRICTLY SPEAKING, JOHN Winthrop (1588-1649) was not one of the Pilgrim Fathers of New England. He did not sail on the Mayjlower in 1620. But ten years later he led, as elected Governor, a fleet of ...

On an autumn day in 1680, the 50-year-old Charles II charged Samuel Pepys with an unusual task. Over two three-hour sittings, one on a Sunday evening, the next the following Tuesday morning, the king ...

In a popular American blog propagating Darwinism, Felipe Fernández-Armesto reports, a well-known biologist with mildly unorthodox views has been described as needing a ‘good punch in the balls’.

The reason why the writer and polemicist Paul Foot has such an exalted reputation has always been a mystery to me. For almost four decades, this hardline Marxist was revered as one of the great ...

The opening premise of Tim Blanning’s attractive book is that there were three revolutions at the turn of the nineteenth century. More or less simultaneously, the Europeanised world experienced a ...

Auguste Rodin ‘haunted’ (his word) the British Museum from the first of his many visits to London in 1881. He was aged forty-one, and already a lauded and successful sculptor, highly attuned to the ...

It is one of the many contentions in this lively, provocative and indeed contentious book that the order to stop the German tanks in May 1940 before they reached Dunkirk can at last be explained ...

One of the most important facts about Michel Houellebecq – usually overlooked in favour of his nihilism, alleged racism and other attention-seeking provocations – is that he is a first-rate prose ...

In the USA, the Holocaust has become an inescapable feature of public life. There is a Holocaust Memorial Museum in downtown Washington, a Holocaust Day, commemorative parks in many cities, and ...

We people of the Anglosphere need to learn the peculiar use among German-speaking economists of the Latin word ordo (‘arrangement’), as in der Ordoliberalismus. The historian Quinn Slobodian’s ...

All too often academics writing on their specialist subjects end up either boring their readers or intimidating them. Paul Freedman, Professor of History at Yale University, proves that it doesn’t ...

To attempt to write a life of Robert Walpole is to climb one of the highest mountains in biography. He dominated English politics for over twenty years, and established a model of government that ...