Andrew Hindmoor has had the prescience to publish a book on British politics in recent decades in the middle of a general election campaign. We get a pacey narrative in which ten of the thirty-six chapters start with reference to a particular date. The book kicks off with the opening of the Millennium Dome on […]
The Weimar Republic (so called as the parliament which drafted its constitution in 1919 sat in Weimar owing to unrest in Berlin) lasted for fourteen years and four months, two years longer than the Third Reich that succeeded it. Its history is beset with ironies. Its first president, Friedrich Ebert, a social democrat (and a […]
A mountain of historical studies testifies to enduring interest in the American Civil War, a conflict still politically relevant in a nation riven over how to remember it. Those doubting that there is anything fresh to say about the bloodiest event in the republic’s history should read Pulitzer Prize winner Alan Taylor’s brilliant, panoramic account of the conflict. Applying a wide continental
One contender for the title of centre of the civilised world in the early 17th century is the Mughal Empire. Lubaaba Al-Azami describes it as ‘a global capital and commercial hub’. The Mughal Empire reached its zenith between the reigns of Babur, the first emperor, who established the ‘golden realm’ in 1526, and his great-great-great-grandson […]
In 1761, a peasant movement calling itself the Bougheleen Bawn, or Whiteboys, suddenly appeared in County Tipperary in Ireland. Bands of men dressed in white smocks, some on horseback, roamed the countryside blowing horns. They levelled fences around land recently enclosed as sheep runs, raided homes for arms and enforced oaths on anyone taking over […]
In the 17th century, the Uffizi offered its visitors a rather more diverse range of exhibits than it does now, among them weapons made by some distant precursor of Q Branch. The Scottish traveller James Fraser on a visit to Florence in the 1650s recorded what he saw: ‘A rarity, five pistol barrels joined together to be put in your hat, which is discharged at once as you salute your enemy & bid him farewell … another pistol with eighteen barrels in it to be shot desperately and scatter through a room as you enter.’ It is not possible to go very far in the divided Europe of the early modern period without coming across some instance of the many kinds of covert activity that are chronicled in this genial and immensely readable work. The spirit of the age is captured in an extraordinary line in the poem ‘Character of an Ambassador’ by the Dutch polymath and diplomat Constantijn Huygens, which says that ambassadors are ‘honourable spies’.
Few places and periods in history conjure up such powerful images as Belle Epoque Paris: the cabarets of Montmartre, the glamour of the Grands Boulevards, the glories of Impressionism and Art Nouveau. Understandably, the era is often viewed through a haze of nostalgia, across the chasm of the First World War. Yet, as Mike Rapport […]
To really appreciate the significance of We Are Your Soldiers, one must have a feel for the historiography. The last time, for instance, I was in Cairo, the National Archives of Egypt was holding an exhibition on President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Included were such relics for veneration as a pair of the former president’s socks, […]
Three interwar European regimes, the governments of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and the USSR, have been damned as ‘totalitarian’. The word originated in Italy, where it was first applied to Benito Mussolini’s regime by the patriotic anti-Fascist Giovanni Amendola. It was then adopted by the Fascists as a description of their purpose, encompassing the idea […]
‘There’s something about caves,’ Stefanos Geroulanos observes towards the end of this deft and provocative book. They devour and block out the light, forcing us to listen, to see with our minds. Those musings serve as an introduction to a chapter on the modern discovery of prehistoric cave paintings in such places as Altamira and […]
In 1603, Elizabeth I died after a reign of almost forty-five years, to be succeeded by James VI of Scotland. Her reputation then was ‘far less rosy’ than it is today. She had long declined to marry or name a successor, and yet the regime changed from Tudor to Stuart with apparent ease, leaving the […]
By 1914, the city of Lemberg had been a centre of learning and the arts for centuries. Here, in the capital of Austrian Galicia, Poles, Ruthenians, Germans and Jews talked, studied, worked and worshipped side by side. Hundreds of similar cities and towns dotted the borderlands of eastern Europe, the crumple zone where three empires […]
This scholarly, often original and always readable study of British and Russian relations in the 19th century is based primarily on diplomatic correspondence and records of ministries of foreign affairs, and secondarily on press sources and private archives. The book begins with chapters tracing the first encounters between Russia and England in the 16th century. […]
The Scandal of the Century is an enjoyable read, but there is no denying that it has its quirks. The title refers to the elopement in 1682 of eighteen-year-old Lady Henrietta Berkeley, daughter of the first Earl of Berkeley, with the rackety Protestant conspirator Lord Grey of Werke. Her father’s dismay was exacerbated by the […]
For a churchman whose career ended in disaster on the scaffold, Charles I’s final archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, casts a very long shadow on English history. In the history of the Church of England, the aborted Laudian reforms represent a path not taken. Their importance has been magnified by the fact that they were […]
To be a ‘bluestocking’ is nowadays considered the pits. Yet in their heyday, the second half of the 18th century, the original bluestockings were respected and even admired. The trashing of this lively, intelligent, spirited group of women began in around 1800. It culminated in Thomas Rowlandson’s 1815 caricature of a group of harridans tearing each other’s hair out and clothes off over – connecting them to dangerously radical politics – a puddle of French cream. The Victorians
When Adalbero, archbishop of Rheims, stood up to speak at a gathering of the leading French magnates in Senlis in late May 987, all eyes were on him. Only a few weeks earlier, the young French king, Louis V, had died unexpectedly in a hunting accident, raising serious questions about the succession to the throne. […]
‘This is not a land to stop in unless necessary,’ María de Salinas, a gentlewoman in the service of Princess Katherine of Aragon, wrote to her brother-in-law. It was 8 March, probably 1507 or 1508. Prince Arthur had died some years earlier and Katherine was now a widow, kept in gilded penury by Henry VII. […]
The medium by which meetings were arranged, debts and wagers settled, tabs in taverns recorded, jokes made and insults spelt out: chalk markings were everywhere in the 18th-century cityscape. Chalk is washed away soon enough, alas, and the message will be scrubbed clear forever unless someone thinks fit to record it on paper. In 1731, […]
In the summer of 1938, the attention of the world was focused on the state of Czechoslovakia. At issue was what to many seemed a deeply moral question of whether democracy or dictatorship would prevail there. The country was suddenly awash with British visitors – politicians, journalists and curious tourists. The most important was Walter […]
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Knowledge of Sufism increased markedly with the publication in 1964 of The Sufis, by Idries Shah. Nowadays his writings, much like his father’s, are dismissed for their Orientalism and inaccuracy.
@fitzmorrissey investigates who the Shahs really were.
Fitzroy Morrissey - Sufism Goes West
Fitzroy Morrissey: Sufism Goes West - Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah by Nile Green
literaryreview.co.uk
Rats have plagued cities for centuries. But in Baltimore, researchers alighted on one surprising solution to the problem of rat infestation: more rats.
@WillWiles looks at what lessons can be learned from rat ecosystems – for both rats and humans.
Will Wiles - Puss Gets the Boot
Will Wiles: Puss Gets the Boot - Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Twisters features destructive tempests and blockbuster action sequences.
@JonathanRomney asks what the real danger is in Lee Isaac Chung's disaster movie.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/eyes-of-the-storm