the Ottoman empire
Flirting in 15th-century Florence
In his history of male-male sexual relations, Noel Malcolm describes how a man in Renaissance Italy would seduce a boy in the street by seizing his hat and holding it ransom
Downhill all the way: the decline of the British Empire after 1923
Matthew Parker gives us snapshots of Britain’s sprawling dominions in September 1923, showing both governors and governed increasingly questioning the purpose of the empire
Truly magnificent
Suleiman I richly deserved his epithet, as this vivid account of his early years illustrates, says Jason Burke
The sick man of Europe finally succumbs
In a possibly apocryphal story, Henry Kissinger, while visiting Beijing in 1972 as Nixon’s national security adviser, asked Zhou Enlai,…
Too little, too late
The atrocities suffered by an estimated one million Armenians in 1915 have been largely ignored by historians and officially denied by the Turks. It’s a centenary we can’t afford to neglect, says Justin Marozzi
City of a thousand and one nights
Ali A. Allawi on the fluctuating fortunes of Iraq’s fabled capital
The Great Game in Arabia
How do you write a new book about T.E. Lawrence, especially when the man himself described his escapades, or a…
