Of all the dominant actors on the mid-19th-century scene, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte was the most charismatic and divisive. Admittedly he had nothing of that physique du rôle which a nation traditionally demands of its leaders. ‘The Emperor is extremely short’, noted Queen Victoria after their first meeting at Windsor Castle, ‘but with a head and a bust which ought to belong to a much taller man.’ Yet though Prince Albert dismissed him as merely ‘a walking lie’, she herself was won over quickly enough by her guest’s deep-layered charm, with its touch of flirtatiousness. ‘His love-­making’, noted the foreign secretary... read more

Regardless of one’s religious or confessional perspective, the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth at the hands of the Roman authorities c AD 33 represents one of the most momentous events in world history. Over the course of the coming centuries, the followers of this Jewish messianic preacher would establish themselves as arguably the first ‘world religion’. On present estimates they comprise over a quarter of the globe’s population. Jesus did not, of course, understand himself as founding a new faith; his teachings were meant to represent the continuation – and culmination – of a tradition of revelation stretching back to Abraham and Isaac... read more

Since the start of Russia’s war in Ukraine, the SBU (the Ukrainian secret service) has been waging a campaign against Russian officers on their home turf and even outside apartment blocks in Moscow, as well as against Ukrainian collaborators in the Donbas. One target perished while riding an elevator with a bomb on its roof. Another died after a volunteer prostitute fixed a device to her client’s mattress. Like their FSB and GRU equivalents, the SBU agents who do these things are hard-drinking tough guys (mostly), but with an ability to think outside bureaucratic boxes. This is a story about critical infrastructure... read more

In the Cold War struggle between the West and the Soviet Bloc, nothing was off limits. Not the space race. Not the Olympic Games. Not even cows. Reared on Cuba’s Isle of Pines, Ubre Blanca (White Udder) could produce an astonishing volume of gold top. She was Comecon’s answer to Beecher Arlinda Ellen, a prodigious milch cow out of Rochester, Indiana. Within a year of taking power in 1959, Fidel Castro decreed the most desirable product of the national herd was no longer beef but milk, to suckle Cuba’s young... read more

‘History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes’ is an aphorism usually attributed to Mark Twain, whose satirical novel The Gilded Age (cowritten with Charles Dudley Warner) was published three months after the Wall Street panic of 1873. That episode is pivotal in Liaquat Ahamed’s panorama of the origins of an era of deflation, stagnation and unrest – the ‘first Great Depression’ – that afflicted much of the world for the rest of the century. Twain himself later wrote... read more

In his introduction to a selection of Chekhov’s short fiction published in 1998, the novelist Richard Ford remarked, ‘there is, of course, no typical Chekhov story, a fact that by itself should please us, and makes the pseudo-critical shorthand of “Chekhovian” essentially pointless.’ This new and much longer collection of fifty-eight freshly translated items, all dating from 1880–82 and largely unknown outside Russian collected... read more