Writing about the BBC by James Butler, Stefan Collini, Marilyn Butler, Owen Bennett-Jones, Andrew O’Hagan, Jenny Turner, Jenny Diski, Karl Miller, Ian Jack, Lynsey Hanley and Hugo Williams.
The captain of HMS Wager had shot dead an unarmed sailor. Other men had been found murdered. The captain had been imprisoned by his own marines, and then left behind on the island by most of the crew. Others had been killed or abandoned along the way. There had been some cannibalism.
Women in philosophy have always needed a special stroke of luck. Like men, they have usually had to be well-born, well-off, talented and – in the European tradition at least – white. But most women . . .
In 1607 John Derpier, an argumentative Wiltshire gentleman, was hauled before an ecclesiastical court for publicly proclaiming ‘the most hereticall & damnable opinion (that there was noe god & noe . . .
Not many artists merit an exhibition where none of their work is on display. But for the masters of classical Greece there is little choice: most of their paintings and sculptures have been lost or . . .
In Jude the Obscure, Jude Fawley finds himself living in Beersheba, the area of Oxford we know as Jericho, home at the time to a community of craftsmen and artisans who maintained the fabric of the . . .
Public speech was a – if not the – defining attribute of maleness. A woman speaking in public was, in most circumstances, by definition not a woman.
He sounds like the Europeans described by V.S. Naipaul – the grandson of indentured labourers – in A Bend in the River, who ‘wanted gold and slaves, like everybody else’, but also ‘wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves’.
It is possible to take too many notes; the task of sorting, filing and assimilating them can take for ever, so that nothing gets written. The awful warning is Lord Acton, whose enormous learning never resulted in the great work the world expected of him.
Robespierre thought that, if you could imagine a better society, you could create it. He needed a corps of moral giants at his back, but found himself leading a gang of squabbling moral pygmies. This is how Virtue led to Terror.
In a happier age, Immanuel Kant identified one of the problems of understanding any of the genocides which come all too easily to mind. It is the problem of the mathematical sublime. The...
‘Iwill never, come hell or high water, let our distinctive British identity be lost in a federal Europe.’ John Major’s ringing assurance to last year’s Conservative Party...
Afew weeks ago, in Mexico, I was asked to sign a protest against Christopher Columbus, on behalf of the original native populations of the American continents and islands, or rather, of their...
The historian Edward Hallett Carr died on 3 November 1982, at the age of 90. He had an oddly laconic obituary in the Times, which missed out a great deal. If he had died ten years before, his...
War has been throughout history the curse and inspiration of mankind. The sufferings and destruction that accompany it rival those caused by famine, plague and natural catastrophes. Yet in nearly...
Writing about the BBC by James Butler, Stefan Collini, Marilyn Butler, Owen Bennett-Jones, Andrew O’Hagan, Jenny Turner, Jenny Diski, Karl Miller, Ian Jack, Lynsey Hanley and Hugo Williams.
Writing about how (not) to stage a coup by Hilary Mantel, Thomas Jones, Perry Anderson, Patricia Beer, Christopher Hitchens, Ella George, Bruce Ackerman, Alexandra Reza, James Meek and John Perry.
Christopher Clark explains why the revolutions of 1848 weren’t failures, and why we should think about them now.
Though people like Vasily Vereshchagin often castigated the British for the arrogance and cruelty of their brand of imperialism, in practice the Russians were no better. Clichés such as Russia being ‘between...
Routinely sewn into male but not into female clothing, they have helped men make their way through the world, fully equipped, as if they were armoured vehicles or portable garden sheds.
Mrs Berkshire went swiftly upstairs and put a bold eye to the keyhole. When she did, she saw that Pratt and Smith’s trousers were down. Later, in court, she confirmed that she had seen both men’s private...
Samuel Moyn doesn’t really believe that his four Cold War liberals (Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, Lionel Trilling and Judith Shklar), much less all those to whom that label might conceivably be applied,...
I am reminded of the first maps I saw as a child, hanging on the walls of British classrooms. Of course, the colour that occurred most often on those maps was red, not white, a difference in surface but...
Drones have brought major changes to the battlefield, but the machines that have had the most striking impact are cheap ones originally designed for the consumer market and adapted in the field for lethal...
Each war speaks to every war, providing fresh testimony of nerves strained, hopes raised and dashed. And yet there is something tragically unusual – nearly unique – about these particular letters:...
The leisured wealthy spent a lot of time chasing not only health, but a glimmering dream of something like the modern idea of ‘wellness’. Galen railed against this idea. He recognised that the full-time...
Acid house wasn’t a genre of dance music so much as a new way of experiencing it: audiences dressed down, parties ran all night and – so dancers reported – social divisions disintegrated, helped...
The Weimar Republic was a ‘great crossroads of modernism’, where cultural innovators from many countries mingled, experimented and lived in defiance of convention. All this was destroyed when the Nazis...
At the heart of Brian Cummings’s Bibliophobia is a sense of the book as a ‘liminal object’, by which Cummings means that the book is both vessel and object, something that carries and something that...
The peculiarities of the British constitution mean that it requires the combined input of the disciplines of law, politics and history – each with its own priorities, sensitivities and hinterlands of...
In its modern incarnations, sport is a spontaneous thing, blowing wherever the fans fancy. Even the impulses that have transformed Britain into a nation of joggers and gym bunnies remain mysterious. They...
Linnaeus’s personal contradictions do not make him a historical chimera. If he sounds odd to those who hold a view of Enlightenment science as rational and orderly, perhaps that’s because real Enlightenment...
It was impossible to tell where my ancestors were buried or the location of the mass grave containing five hundred of the town’s Jews, shot in 1942. But few descendants of the Ostjuden who visit Eastern...
What was this Society for which Pope Paul III provided a charter? It was not a religious order, though it is often styled as such. Its members were neither monks nor friars. Its self-descriptor as a...
Devotees often exult in the stripping of her beauty and her wealth; she is imagined as a woman of substance, who owned property in Magdala (hence her name), and when she repents and gives all this up,...
The gruelling, often grotesque nature of the Italian campaign is reason enough to remember it, but it’s been overlooked, idly regarded as filler between the defeat of Rommel and the Normandy Landings.
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