Book review – History
Blown to blazes
Philip Hensher on a little-known episode of first world war history when a munitions factory in Kent exploded in April 1916, claiming over 100 lives
Two wheels good
Bicycles — in Britain, anyway — are the Marmite means of transport. I am among the bicycle-lovers, almost religious and…
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,…
Full of sound and fury
John Knox, Cranmer complained, was ‘one of those unquiet spirits, which can like nothing but that is after their own…
Gunning for freedom
Like the documentary journalist Iain Overton, author of this book, I was taught to shoot and maintain a gun as…
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
Early Christian alms race
Peter Brown’s explorations of the mindsets of late antiquity have been educating us for nearly half a century, ever since…
Attack of the night witches
The name Lyuba Vinogradova may not ring any bells, but her ferrety eye for spotting a telling detail may already…
Swing, swing together
The public schools ought to have gone out of business long ago. The Education Act of 1944, which promised ‘state-aided…
Back-stabbing the old warrior
Coalitions, as David Cameron has discovered, are tricky things to manage. How much more difficult, then, was it for Winston…
Big Cheese in MI6
Second world war deception operations are now widely known, particularly those which misled the Germans into thinking that the D-Day…
Wait until dark
James McConnachie discovers that some of the greatest English writers — Chaucer, Blake, Dickens, Wordsworth, Dr Johnson — drew inspiration and even comfort from walking around London late at night
Women take wing
Although the young women of the 1950s hovered on the cusp of change, many did not know it. Valerie Gisborn…
Worshipping the body beautiful
My favourite fact about gyms before reading this book was that the average British gym member covers 468 miles per…
The man who disappeared
In the pre-dawn hours of 20 September 1918, a train, its headlamp off, heading eastwards out of Kransnovodsk on the…
Ten days in May
‘If the war is lost, then it is of no concern to me if the people perish in it.’ Bruno…
Muck and brass
The whole idea of capitalism, according to Enlightenment philosophers, was that it created a positive spiral of moral behaviour. ‘Concern…
One dark summer’s day
Of all the big battalions of books marking the bicentenary of the battle of Waterloo that have come my way,…
Gordon Bennett, what a disaster!
In the course of the 19th century, various flotillas of expeditions hastened to the polar regions in little wooden ships…
A cavalcade of plump lovelies
In a tone of breezy bravado in keeping with their concept of their subject’s character, Don Jordan and Michael Walsh…
Plumbing the depths of horror
Concentration camps in Nazi Germany were originally set up in 1933 to terrorise Hitler’s political enemies; as war drew near,…
1386 and all that
Sam Leith describes the frequently lonely, squalid and hapless life of the father of English poetry
Silent knight
In February 1861 a 21-year-old French medievalist called Paul Meyer walked into Sotheby’s auction house near Covent Garden. He had…
Dirty white gold
If not for cotton, we would still be wearing wool. To equal current cotton production, we would need seven billion…
Of cabbages and kings
Nigel Jones reviews the first five titles to appear in a new series on British monarchs
