‘Happiness is the ultimate goal because it is self-evidently good. If we are asked why happiness matters we can give no further external reason. It just obviously does matter.’ Richard Layard, an ...
The easy way to write a full-scale life of Winston Churchill is to quarry material from the official biography, eight huge tomes completed by Martin Gilbert and accompanied by documentary volumes that ...
The Allied invasion of mainland Italy in the Second World War, which began on the morning of 9 September 1943 with a landing on the beaches of Salerno, south of Naples, was the largest amphibious ...
When Prince Charles eventually becomes king, during ‘the most sacred part of the ceremony’ he will be anointed on his head, heart, shoulders, hands and elbows with ‘ambraegrisiae 3iiij’, a fragrant ...
This is the first book devoted to the history of the British country house library. Mark Purcell was the libraries curator at the National Trust from 1999 to 2015, and his text is naturally arranged ...
It is strange to think that Rose Tremain is always more concerned with outsiders than insiders. To those familiar only with her best-selling, prize-winning novels like Restoration, Music & Silence and ...
THE ROMANTICISM THAT clothed the British effort in the Second World War has taken some decades to wear thin. Correlli Barnett, in his magisterial The Audit of War (published in 1986), gave the lie to ...
David Edgerton is a myth-buster extraordinaire. Whether explaining how new technologies did not at once supersede old ones (steamships were slow to overtake clippers) or demonstrating that Britain was ...
Do we experience life as a continuum or as a series of disconnected shocks and accidents? Alice Munro started writing at a time when novelists, at least, were preoccupied with coherence, with ...
I realised almost as soon as I began reading Norman Davies’s new history of the Second World War in Europe that I was not the best person to review it. In his introduction he says, without a blushing ...
Sir Ian Kershaw has emerged, rather surprisingly, as a towering figure amongst historians of modern Germany. Surprisingly, because he began his career as a medievalist whose focus was Bolton Priory in ...
Good history opens up sightlines not only to the past but to the present as well. It allows us to see aspects of our current circumstance as the product of developments that are deeper and richer than ...