The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
The Stories Old Towns Tell: A Journey through the Cities at the Heart of Europe This is in many ways a book about the history which history forgot. In it, the cities of central and eastern Europe come alive with a cornucopia of intriguing facts and fascinating...
Between the end of the Renaissance and the start of the Enlightenment, Europe lived through an era known as the Age of Reason. This was a period which saw widespread advances in the arts and sciences. Artists such as Caravaggio, Rembrandt and Van Dyk flourished across...
It is generally accepted that the European Renaissance began in Italy. However, as this developed south of the Alps a historical transformation of similar magnitude began taking place in northern Europe. This ‘Other Renaissance’ was initially centred on the city of...
Paul, your book was published 15 years ago to great acclaim. Why did you write it, after all it’s the only book you’ve written on the Napoleonic period. First and foremost I wrote Napoleon in Egypt because it was such an gripping story - one which included everything...
The Other Renaissance with Paul Strathern | RSS.com
Cities come and go, some destroyed by humanity, others by nature, others simply abandoned. Several decades ago, I happened upon an example of the last kind, in India. The redstone city was deserted, its wide empty paved streets extending into the distance towards the...
Early in Richard Cohen’s excellent Making History he quotes his distinguished predecessor, the late John Burrow: ‘Almost all historians … have some characteristic weakness … It is often the source of their most interesting writing’. Cohen’s weaknesses are for story,...
In 1308, the exiled Florentine poet Dante Alighieri described how, midway through his life, he found himself lost amidst a dark wood, with no sign of a path. He had no idea how he had arrived where he was. His mind was fogged; it was as if he had woken from a deep...
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First let’s deal with the elelphant in the room. Nicholas Crane’s Latitude will inevitably draw comparison with Dava Sobel’s surprise runaway best-seller Longitude, which was published over a quarter of a century ago in 1993 and has remained in print ever since. Sobel...
