History
Black and beyond
When Prince Albert died in 1861, aged 42, Queen Victoria, after briefly losing the use of her legs, ordered that…
China’s iron lady
For susceptible Englishmen of a certain inclination — like Sir Edmund Backhouse or George Macdonald Fraser — the Empress Dowager…
Best of enemies
The Great War was an obscene and futile conflict laying waste a generation and toppling emperors. Yet here are two…
Low, dishonest decade
When Gordon Brown eventually became aware that his Downing Street was about to be engulfed in the Smeargate scandal, he…
Child-swapping opium addicts…
The last time the general reader was inveigled into the domestic intensities of the Wordsworth circle was by Frances Wilson…
Gay abandon
Richard Davenport-Hines on the charmed, dizzy world of the multi-talented Colette
Medieval indulgence
Think of an art at which the English have excelled and I doubt you would come up with the word…
The power of the word
The recorder of early Jewish history has two sources of evidence. One is the Bible. Its centrality was brought home…
Shady groves of academe
The scene is the common room of All Souls College, Oxford, in the first week of March 1963. It is…
Driving me crazy
My various Oxford dictionaries define bizarre as eccentric, whimsical, odd, grotesque, fantastic, mixed in style and half-barbaric. By so many…
Pericles for king
My brother Pericles Wyatt, as my father liked to say, is by blood the rightful king of England, the nephew…
All work and no play
Stage Blood, as its title suggests, is as full of vitriol, back-stabbing and conspiracy as any Jacobean tragedy. In this…
Flower power
After the success of their animal series of monographs, Reaktion Books have had the clever idea of doing something similar…
Back to the camps
Confronted by this lavishly endorsed book — ‘compelling’ (David Lodge), ‘gripping’(John le Carré),‘thrilling’ (Jonathan Freedland) — I felt depressed. Two…
Donkeys led by donkeys
David Crane is taken aback by the particular contempt Max Hastings appears to reserve for the British at the outbreak of the first world war
Doctor in a toga
In the first draft of the screenplay for the film Gladiator, the character to be played by Russell Crowe (‘father…
Friends before foes
Like Miranda Seymour, the author of this considerable work on Anglo-German relations, I was raised in a Germanophile home. I…
Get Shorty
It is by now surely beyond doubt that those governments committed to fighting the war on drugs — and on…
The leader who followed
The historian of China Frank Dikötter has taken a sledgehammer to demolish perhaps the last remaining shibboleth of modern Chinese…
The hero of Burma
Given the outcome of recent military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is pertinent to look for one particular quality…
Madness and mayhem
The inbred Habsburg monarchs, who for centuries ruled without method over a vast, ramshackle empire, managed to leave an indelible mark on modern Europe, says Sam Leith
Overnight trillionaires
In Germany in 1923 money was losing its value so fast that the state printing works could not keep up.…
Self-whipping
Isabel Hardman of this parish explained after last week’s government defeat that a deluded theory among the party leadership had…
Writ in stone
James McConnachie finds that theology and geology have been unlikely bedfellows for centuries
Fighting communism single-handed
Had Onan not spilled his seed upon the ground, he might have invented invisible ink. The possibility had not occurred…
