History
Serhii Plokhy on the Russo-Ukrainian War
Our editor discussed the war in Ukraine back in 2023.
As the conflict in Ukraine moves into the second year of the second phase (having started in 2014 with Russia’s invasion of the Donbas and Crimea), Serhii Plokhy, historian of the region, has written an account that looks back to the historical background from...
The Glutton and the Flatterer
Vitellius came from a long line of talented courtiers, but when he gained the big job, it was a little more than he bargained for.
The Emperor Vitellius was not a man of whom Roman historians have ever been proud. He was one of four emperors in 69 CE, the year after the death of Nero, and was famed mainly for eating massive helpings of seafood. Since his nasty death by a thousand cuts, slowly...
Migration & The End of Empire
The view that it was immigration that brought down the Roman Empire does have truth to it, but the idea that the theory can now be applied to the modern West is simplistic.
Migration & The End of Empire However you line up the different factors involved, there’s no doubt that immigration played a major role in the unravelling of the western half of the Roman imperial system. By the end of the fifth century AD, from Anglo-Saxons north...
The Rome Escape Line, by Sam Derry
A very touching book that shows the full cross-section of life in an escape-line.
The Rome Escape Line Lt Colonel Sam Derry’s memoir is an intriguing account of daring escapes and the day-to-day struggles of a clandestine organisation operating under the nose of an enemy who is actively hunting it down. Derry was taken prisoner during the North...
In Search of Lawrence of Arabia in London
T.E. Lawrence is present in many London locations.
T.E. Lawrence, known as Lawrence of Arabia, is one of the most intriguing individuals of the twentieth century, who remarkably had strong associations with buildings and places in London. At the beginning of the First World War between October to November 1914, he was...
Episode 141
Lady Caroline Lamb, by Antonia Fraser
A finely wrought portrait from Antonia Fraser.
History has not been kind to Caroline Lamb. The writer and lover of Lord Byron, who characterised him as ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’, has generally been dismissed by his biographers, and those of her husband, William Lamb, the future Lord Melbourne, as an...
A Persian Journey
Dorothy Wellesley was a poet, gardener, traveller and heiress - a fascinating and complex woman whose marriage failed after an affair with Vita Sackville-West
A Persian Journey ‘This Persian journey was the best in all my life’. I came across this note in a diary my grandmother Dorothy (‘Dottie’) Wellesley had kept during a trip to Persia in 1927. She added these words nearly twenty-five years later when she was writing her...
Secrets & The Public Interest
The story of Walter Bell, MI6 and MI5 officer.
Secrets & The Public Interest In October 2005, while the late MI6 and MI5 officer Walter Bell’s personal papers were gathering dust , undiscovered in the basement of his London home, the historian Peter Hennessy, in the prestigious annual Cambridge Hinsley...