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
Ordinary Germans under the Third Reich did have wills of their own, argues Dominic Green. Most actively embraced Nazi ideology, and were aware of the extermination of the Jews. As the war worsened for them, what did they think they were fighting for?
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…
