Book review – History
How Diderot’s pleas to end despotism fell on deaf ears in Russia
Denis Diderot (1713–84) is the least commemorated of the philosophes. Calls for his remains to be moved to the Panthéon…
The unearthly powers of the North Pole
Having spent too much of my life at both poles (writing, not sledge-pulling), I know the spells those places cast.…
‘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…
Did the notorious Zinoviev letter ever exist?
This is a well-written, scrupulously researched and argued account of an enduring mystery that neatly illustrates the haphazard interactions of…
![The First Opium War: The East India Company’s Nemesis and other boats destroy the Chinese war junks in Anson Bay, 7 January 1841 [Bridgeman Art Library]](https://www.spectator.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/opiumwars.jpg?w=410&h=275&crop=1)
Global Britain was built as a narco-empire
China, wrote Adam Smith, is ‘one of the richest, that is, one of the most fertile, best cultivated, most industrious…
The Inquisition on trial: the ordeals of Giordano Bruno and Galileo
If you go to the Campo dei Fiori in Rome on 17 February every year, you’ll find yourself surrounded by…
Holy mackerel! Civilisation begins with fishing
Fish. Slippery, mysterious creatures. They are mysterious because of where they live, in vast waters, and because they elude the…
The spirits of the age
Children started knocking on my door last month wearing Donald Trump face masks and asking for money. Indeed, one enterprising…
The keys to Chinese
The history of industry is the story of the reduction of complexity to easily manageable, replicable components or actions. But…
The fruits of imperialism
Imagine yourself a middle-class person in England in the 1870s. You sit down to drink a cup of tea while…
The roots of witchcraft
Until the mid-1960s many historians believed witchcraft was a pre-Christian pagan fertility ritual, witches worshipping the Horned God, whose consort…
The new age of the refugee
After years of estrangement in a foreign land, what can immigrants expect to find on their return home? The remembered…
The infamous four
Most books about British traitors feature those who spied for Russia before and during the Cold War, making it easy…
'Wicked old Paris of the Orient': a portrait of 1930s Shanghai
Here’s the Mandarin for ooh-la-la! As Taras Grescoe, a respected Canadian writer of nonfiction, shows in this marvellous, microscopically descriptive…
Breaking the commandments on Moses’s mountain
A medieval party of 800 Armenians at the top of Mount Sinai suddenly found themselves surrounded by fire. Their pilgrim…
Equipped for life with a copy of Thucydides
‘What distinguishes Cambridge from Oxford,’ wrote A.A. Milne in 1939, is that nobody who has been to Cambridge feels impelled…
How The Satanic Verses failed to burn
This is a book which, as one eyes its lavish illustrations and dips into its elegant prose, looks as if…
‘Thou shalt commit adultery’
Jesuits, the leading apologists for Rome and Catholic revival in Elizabethan England, cast a long shadow over the paranoid post-Armada…
The 1850s: a dizzying decade of boom and bust
We can all identify decades in which the world moved forward. Wars are not entirely negative experiences: the social and…
A.C. Grayling reduces history to a game of quidditch
The 17th century scores highly — especially England’s part in it — in A.C. Grayling’s ‘points system’ of history. If only the study of the past were that simple, says Ruth Scurr
The Green Man's journey from Nazi to sweetcorn salesman
The other day I visited a psychic medium in Croydon, south-east London. Mavis Grimstick (not quite her real name) boasted…
Why has China taken so long to make its mark?
‘China is a sleeping lion,’ Napoleon reportedly remarked. ‘When it wakes, the world will tremble.’ There is no need to…
Why do men grow beards?
The ocean that Christopher Oldstone-Moore has set out to chart is as broad as it is shallow: what it has…
Why the British make a virtue of defeat
When Henry Worsley died last month attempting the first solo, unaided expedition across the Antarctic, he was 30 miles short…
Songs of the blood and the sword
Douglas Murray 28 October 2017 9:00 am
Jihadi Culture might sound like a joke title for a book, like ‘Great Belgians’ or ‘Canadian excitements’. But in this…