History
Call that a party?
The ancients certainly knew how to put on a celebration. Let us hope the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee comes up to…
Soldiering on
Given Putin’s less than triumphant operation in Chechnya, where the Russian army suffered catastrophic losses, it is hardly surprising that…
Ship shape
The biggest cruise ship yet builthas just been launched, but in like-for-like terms, it comes nowhere near the Syracusia,built c.…
Law and orders
St. Petersburg University in Russia is (desperately?) inviting scholars worldwide to a conference in September celebrating Mikhail Speransky. It was…
Rewriting history
Historians in Russia have a long and craven record, now going back centuries, of being economical with the truth about…
Raging against God
Patriarch Kirill is Patriarch of Moscow and all Rus’ and Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church; and one of his…
A history lesson for those calling Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe ‘ungrateful’
In the latest installment from the idiot age of Twitter, #ungratefulcow has been trending. The reason? Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe had expressed, mildly and politely,…
Tacit approval
Last week Aristotle offered a lesson in tyrant theory. This week Tacitus (ad 56-c.120) offers one in tyrant practice. Tacitus…
From the Gauls to the Gilets Jaunes
Philip Hensher is enthralled by Graham Robb’s evocative new history of France
Tyrants past and present
Is Putin a tyrant? Aristotle (384-322 bc) might well have thought so. Seeing the turannos as a deviant type of…
High life
Was it Socrates who said that chaos was the natural state of mankind, and tyranny the usual remedy? Actually it…
Vintage years
Across oceans and continents, less favoured nations produce more history than they can consume. In these islands, the English —…
Healthy profit
Yet again ‘doctors’ with no qualifications have been found advertising dodgy but expensive products and treatments, in this case, injections…
Words of advice
The Prime Minister has been having some trouble with his inner circle of advisers. Tacitus supplies fine examples of how…
Classified information
The seduction of back-page ads
Cher options
The singer Cher, now 75, has announced that, because she refuses to appear old, she is not going to allow…
Gathering storm
Whatever the result of Sue Gray’s report on ‘gatherings’ in Downing Street, there is a political lesson to be learned:…
History is less clear as you are living through it
I was recently reading the works of the 17th-century antiquary John Aubrey, who at one point mentions a ghost craze…
Make History Great Again!
Why don’t today’s children know more about history? In an age when information has never been easier to access, it’s…
Doctors at sea
Medicine was founded by Hippocrates in the 5th century BC. Doctors continued to study the Hippocratic texts into the 19th…
Debacle at Dieppe
In my mother’s final days we had a long conversation about the second world war. I asked if she’d ever…
On borrowed time
I write this in a garret a few doors down from the public library in Muswell Hill, north London. It…
Plato the censor
The Globe theatre’s project to ‘decolonise’ Shakespeare, as if that would make plays like The Tempest ‘acceptable’ to them and…
As a matter of curse
Twitter and other easily accessible means of online communication have encouraged the public to believe that Their Voice Will Be…
Rhodes, Columbus and the next heritage battle
On 12 October this year, Columbus Day, a statue of the Italian in Belgrave Square was vandalised by activists from…
