History
Ashes to ashes
‘I cannot describe to you what a curious note of brutality a bomb has,’ said one woman who lived through…
Clash of the Titans
This is an odd book: interesting, informative, intelligent, but still decidedly odd. It is a history of the Victorian era…
Diary
ONE OF THE MINOR sociological treats of being appointed shadow education secretary is a frontbench view of David Cameron’s crimson…
Divinely decadent
With an eye to the blasphemy underlying some of the loveliest Renaissance painting, Honor Clerk will be choosing her Christmas cards more carefully this year
Diplomatic meltdown
In pre-1914 cosmopolitan society, everyone seemed to be related — ambassadors as well as monarchs. But increased militarisation was fast obliterating old family ties, says Jane Ridley
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…
