The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
How did your experience as a war correspondent influence your work as a historian? A lot. It’s been a real help. It has been a great way to see the scene on the ground. The armies moving and empires falling. The espionage that comes with a sort of breakup of power....
The end of World War I was greeted with relief throughout Europe, but in most countries this was accompanied by profound disillusionment with the political and social establishment which had brought it about. Such feelings led to revolution in Russia, Germany and...
“ALL political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure,” wrote Enoch Powell, the controversial but often perspicacious British politician, “because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.” But the political lives of...
In June 1772, Russian forces bombarded, stormed and captured Beirut, a fortress on the coast of Ottoman Syria. The Russians were backing their ally, a ruthless Arab despot. When they returned the next year, they occupied Beirut for almost six months. Then as now, they...
David Boyle I was researching a book about Richard the Lionheart’s journey across southern Europe in disguise in 1192, immediately before his arrest, and the legendary incident involving Blondel the troubadour (though strictly speaking he was a trouvere), and a...
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Russia and Britain are old foes, and War and Peace is a complete fictional world with its own extraordinarily lifelike exuberance but, as with most Russian novels, it is also about Russia’s vision of itself — its quest for its rightful place in civilisation and its...
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What first attracted you to the period or periods you work in? It’s much harder getting into the motivations and mindsets of pre-Enlightenment people, and often requires a higher level of theology than I have. The Enlightenment was the first period in history that the...
