Gandhi on Hitler: ‘I do not believe him to be as bad as he is portrayed’
‘It’s a beautiful world if it wasn’t for Gandhi who is really a perfect nuisance,’ Lord Willingdon, Viceroy of India,…
You didn’t have to be mad to work for Tommy Nutter — but it helped
The tailor’s art is a triumph of mind over schmatte. Not just in the physical cutting and stitching, but in…
Trump, Iran and the end of the deal
For someone so frequently denounced as a liar, Donald Trump keeps an awful lot of promises. In the 2016 election…
James Comey is trying to take down Trump. He’ll fail
Americans forget their corruption in order to savour their innocence. When Republicans and Democrats are struggling to find ways forward…
In 1968, even supercilious Boston was ankle-deep in LSD
‘And this is good old Boston/, The home of the bean and the cod,’ John Collins Bossidy quipped in 1910,…
What do Walt Whitman, Jackson Pollock and Jimi Hendrix have in common?
On 3 September 1968, Allen Ginsberg appeared on William F. Buckley’s Firing Line. Buckley exposed Ginsberg’s politics as fatuous —…
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…
The waves that wrecked Britannia
Military history is more popular than respected. It is not hard to see why. It is masculine history, a trifecta…
Samuel Palmer: from long-haired mystic to High Church Tory
In his youth, Samuel Palmer (1805–1881) painted like a Romantic poet. The moonlit field of ‘The Harvest Moon’ (1831–32) glows…
The swastika was always in plain sight
In 1940, when Stephen Spender heard a German bomber diving down towards London, he calmed himself by imagining that there…
Hirohito, MacArthur and other villains
The history of ‘great events’, Voltaire wrote, is ‘hardly more than the history of crimes’. Physically, the war in Asia…
The long shadow of genocide: Armenia’s vengeance years
One morning in March 1921 a large man in an overcoat left his house in Charlottenburg, Berlin, to take a…
The turbulent reign of King Cotton: the dark history of one of the world’s most important commodities
If not for cotton, we would still be wearing wool. To equal current cotton production, we would need seven billion…
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