History
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…
Absurd plots à la Bond
So James Bond is back, doing exactly what he always does, inviting the audience into a fantasy world for the…
No, America couldn’t have been Canada
What if William Howe, the dithering British commander, hadn’t let the American army escape in the Battle of Long Island…
Magical mountains
A magnificent new history of the Caucasus earns Peter Frankopan’s highest praise
Off colour
In the 18th century, art historians’ admiration for the beauty of white-ish ancient Greek marble statuary led people to draw…
My roots burnt with Greece
On 11 March this year my father passed away from prostate cancer after several weeks in a hospital in central…
The best times you’ll never remember
It was once a favourite theory of optimistic drunkards that a suitably ‘moderate’ level of alcohol consumption provided covert health…
The disgraceful decision to remove Liverpool’s heritage status
Unesco has cancelled the ‘World Heritage Status’ of the Necropolis at Memphis and the Giza Pyramid because a Radisson Blu…
Best behaviour
The Prime Minister is urging citizens not to throw caution to the winds when lockdown ends on 19 July but…
A word to the wise
The delicious hypocrisy at the heart of today’s cancel fraternity is that it is strongly opposed to censorship. Romans grappled…
An imaginative interpretation of the past
Antiquaries have had a bad press. If mentioned at all today, they are often derided as reclusive pedants poring over…
The second-worst journey in the world
The epic story of the Antarctic voyage of the Belgica (1897-9) has all the ingredients of a truly glorious misadventure:…
Athens and the EU
The EU has regularly been likened to the Roman Empire. But its current direction suggests that the Athenian Empire (478-404…
Follow my leader
On the subject of leadership, the Athenian soldier, historian, biographer and essayist Xenophon (c. 430-354 BC) had much to say,…
An orange or an egg?
Simon Winchester follows the volatile French mission to Ecuador in 1735 to determine the shape of the Earth
Fur and feeling
Almost no ancients cared whether animals felt pain or not. The classical Stoic belief that man’s reasoning capacity elevated him…
Nature calls
‘Georgics’ are an ancient form of poetry about agriculture and the land. The term derives from Greek gê ‘land’ +…
Studying history isn’t what it used to be
Is history in danger of becoming a thing of the past on campus? In recent weeks, Aston in Birmingham announced a consultation on…
