Homage to Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman Emperor
It is not often that a book’s blurb gives any idea of what’s inside, but Helen Castor’s endorsement — ‘a…
The glory and the misery of Louis XIV’s France
I was flicking through an old copy of The Spectator the other day, one of the issues containing contributors’ ‘Christmas…
Has Daisy Dunn chosen the wrong Pliny to write about?
I couldn’t help thinking, as I read this book, of an old story, vaguely recalled from English A-level classes, about…
Lotharingia: Charlemagne’s much disputed legacy
In 1919, only months after the end of the Great War, a French airman called Jacques Trolley de Prevaux, accompanied…
‘The reality was disgusting’: Peter Ackroyd slams Victorian Britain
‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times… it was the epoch of belief, it was…
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…
Historian David Edgerton says the ‘British nation’ lasted from 1945 to 1979, the miner’s strike its death knell
It seems somehow symptomatic of David Edgerton’s style as a historian, of a certain wilful singularity, that even his book’s…
Napoleon’s dazzling victories invited a devastating backlash
On 20 July 1805, just three months before the battle of Trafalgar destroyed a combined French and Spanish fleet, the…
Caroline of Ansbach: the best of the Hanoverians
It can sometimes seem — unfairly but irresistibly — as if the sole function of the myriad Lilliputian German statelets…
Raising Cain
It is a pretty safe bet that for every 1,000 people who know of William Wilberforce, no more than the…
When English Catholics were considered as dangerous as jihadis
Martyrdom, these days, does not get a good press. Fifty years ago English Catholics could take a ghoulish pride in…
The forgotten army: abandoned by the British to the horrors of Partition
It is often said that cricket was ‘a game invented by the English and played by Indians’, and every so…
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…
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…
Narrative history at its best – and bloodiest
Anyone thinking of bringing out a book on Waterloo at the moment must be very confident, very brave or just…
If you want to admire Napoleon, it helps not to have met Gaddafi
Forty-odd years ago, in the early phase of the Gaddafi regime, I had the slightly mixed fortune to attend the…
An old soldier sees through the smoke of Waterloo
There is a very nice story of a dinner for Waterloo veterans at which Alexandre Dumas — ‘Dum-ass,’ as the…
Patrick Leigh Fermor and the long, daft tradition of Brits trying to save Greece
Twenty-odd years ago, while on holiday in the deep Mani at the foot of the Peloponnese, I got into conversation…
Look again – the first world war poets weren't pacifists
If the poets of the first world war probably enjoy a higher profile now than they have done at any…
War is good for us
At the heart of this work is a startling and improbable statistic and the equally surprising and counterintuitive thesis that…
How Denmark’s Jews escaped the Nazis
Of all the statistics generated by the Holocaust, perhaps some of the most disturbing in the questions they give rise…
How we beat Napoleon
It feels the height of ingratitude to blame Jane Austen for anything, but it probably is her fault that most…
Why does Max Hastings have such a hatred for the British military?
One of the great problems for any historian writing of 1914 and the slide into conflict is that everyone knows…
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