Wednesday, 21 September 2016

I think it comes from the innumeracy of our journalistic and intellectual culture

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Why the gloom [about the modern world]? Partly it's the result of market forces in the punditry business, which favours the Cassandras ...
Tuesday, 20 September 2016

Democracy came too early to America

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The historian Peter Spierenburg has provocatively suggested that 'democracy came too early' to America. In Europe, first the state d...
Monday, 19 September 2016

With the battle-ax, sir, with the battle-ax!

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The journalist Steven Sailer recounts a exchange from early-20th-century England: 'A hereditary member of the British House of Lords co...
Sunday, 18 September 2016

A few cavities, the odd abscess, and a couple if inches of height were a small price to pay for a fivefold better chance of not getting speared.

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[C]ompared to hunter-gatherers, the first city dwellers were anemic, infected, tooth-decayed, and almost two and a half inches shorter. Som...
Thursday, 8 September 2016

Of the ninety-one detained, all but nine were shot

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Of the 101 members of the supreme military leadership, all but ten were arrested; of the ninety-one detained, all but nine were shot. These...
Wednesday, 7 September 2016

In 1500, there were around 500 political units in Europe; in 1900, there were twenty-five

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The centuries that followed the emergence of Europe as a global power were accompanied by relentless consolidation and covetousness. In 150...
Tuesday, 6 September 2016

How useful it is for leaders who have a view to posterity to patronise historians who write sympathetically of their age of empire

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Blanket images of the mongols as barbaric destroyers are wide of the mark, and represent the misleading legacies of the histories written l...