Book review – History
Dead poets’ society
In December 1817 Benjamin Robert Haydon — vivid diarist and painter of huge but inferior canvases of historic events —…
Send in the clowns
Nell Gifford joins a colourful troupe of acrobats, contortionists, lion-tamers, freaks and funambulists
Daring a fleeting smile
In 1787 critics of the Paris Salon were scandalised by a painting exhibited by Mme Vigée Le Brun. The subject…
Brave, drunken, violent and law-abiding
Here is a stupendous achievement: a narrative history of England which is both thorough and arresting. Very few writers could…
Travels in Nowhere Land
Transnistria is not an area well-served by travel literature or, really, literature of any kind. The insubstantial-seeming post-Soviet sandwich-filling between…
Serving Mammon first
The Saudis, official custodians of Islam’s holiest place, have bulldozed its historical sites, perverted its religion and turned Mecca into one vast shopping mall, says Justin Marozzi
The butt of jests and ribaldry
Few people, perhaps, will immediately seize on this title as just the thing for a relative’s Christmas, even if their…
Scotland the brave
In 1707 Scotland surrendered what it had of its independence by the Treaty of Union with England. That independence had…
The empire on which the sun never set
Geoffrey Parker is a product of Nottingham and Christ’s College Cambridge, and I think was once a pupil of the…
Heads will roll
A severed head, argues Frances Larson in her sprightly new book, is ‘simultaneously a person and a thing… an apparently…
Skulls and cross bones
Skulls, femurs, ribs, pelvises, piled on top of each other in a chaotic heap: this, Denise Inge discovered, was what…
Mother Courage
Italo Calvino, the Italian arch-fabulist, wrote a foreword to this celebrated wartime diary when it appeared in Italy in 1956.…
The parlour-game approach
A group of retired Somerset farmers were sitting about in the early 1960s, so Ian Mortimer’s story goes, debating which…
Cometh the hour, cometh the man
An eccentric, thoroughgoing genius, surfing every wave with a death-defying self-belief — Philip Hensher wonders who Boris Johnson can be thinking of
The Unbeaten vs the Unbeatable
The Kaiser’s war deprived Britain of her centenary celebrations of the victory at Waterloo. It also set the propagandists something…
Palaces for the people
Sir Winston Churchill did not invent the prefab, but on 26 March 1944 he made an important broadcast promising to…
When Hitler’s dream came true
In 1946, in the aftermath of a devastating war, the world seemed a very dark place indeed, says Sam Leith
A terrible beauty
Anyone thinking of bringing out a book on Waterloo at the moment must be very confident, very brave or just…
Derring dos and don’ts
Recent years have seen the slim but splendid Patrick Leigh Fermor oeuvre swell considerably. In 2008 came In Tearing Haste,…
An intellectual in intelligence
Shortly after the war began in September 1939, the branch of the intelligence services called MI8, or the Radio Security…
The Forgotten Army remembered
The British who fought in Burma became known as the ‘Forgotten Army’ because this was a neglected theatre of the…
From dram shop to Queen Mother’s handbag
Gin Glorious Gin: How Mother’s Ruin Became the Spirit of London is a jaunty and diverting history of ‘a wonderful…
We shall fight them on the beaches…
Dad’s Army, the sitcom to end all sitcoms, portrayed the Home Guard as often doddery veterans. In one episode, Private…
Full of sound and fury
The French Revolution ushered in not only a revolution of rolling heads but of talking ones too. ‘Speech-making was a…
Roll out the barrel
‘He was a wise man who invented beer,’ said Plato, although I imagine he had changed his mind by the…
