There was less to Eric Hobsbawm than met the eye. By the standards of British professors in the late 20th century he led an exciting life, but these are not high standards. Born in 1917, his upbringing, first in Vienna and then in Berlin, gave him a certain exoticism. He was Jewish and would have faced danger in the late 1930s had he stayed in Germany. But he had a British passport and was easily able to move to England, where he lived for the rest of his life, bar research trips... read more

A highly readable gallop through one of the world’s most complex political environments, The Cauldron is brilliant on narrative, weaker on analysis. Simon Sebag Montefiore has set himself a formidable task: to compress the modern history of a region extending from Morocco to Iran, and from the fall of the Ottoman Empire to the wars of 2026, into a single volume. The result is an exuberant pageant of sultans, shahs, kings, colonels, spies, revolutionaries and assassins. Few historians could move so confidently... read more

Most people will come to this biography with bemusement. They might wonder why the preposterously pink Barbara Cartland, purveyor of pulp paperback romances, is worthy of anyone’s attention, let alone that of the cultured Matthew Sweet. Not I. A few years ago I wrote a novel about Princess Diana and her unlikely, even farcical, path to the royal altar. While researching my book, I discovered that the young Diana was addicted to Barbara Cartland novels, a refuge from her unhappy childhood. The books completely... read more

Every now and then, a serious scholar wins the lottery. An academic journal publishes their research and the article crosses over into the mainstream, making them rich and famous. Fortune has smiled like this on many academics, but none so lucratively as Francis Fukuyama in 1989. That summer, the National Interest featured Fukuyama’s article ‘The End of History?’, in which the author recognised both that the Cold War was ending and that he wasn’t sure what was coming next – hence the question mark in his title... read more

The sixth volume in David Kynaston’s history of postwar Britain covers the eighteen months between the death of Winston Churchill and England’s victory over Germany in the World Cup, for which the celebrations matched those of VE Day. Around Piccadilly, said screenwriter Laurence Marks, the blast of car horns was incessant: ‘It’s deafening. Union Jacks seem to be waving everywhere. People are dancing in the streets. People are crying. Grown men. Girls are removing their clothes and climbing up Eros.’... read more

Prime Minister Burnham’s brush with investors in gilts was short and sour. He argued that Britain needed to stop being ‘in hock to the bond markets’. The gilt market duly responded and yields began to rise before he quickly engaged reverse gear and confirmed his support for Rachel Reeves’s fiscal framework. It puts one in mind of James Carville’s clumsy bon mot about wanting to be reincarnated as the bond market so as to be able to terrify everyone. In A Fabulous Debt, Robin... read more