Pathology and Politics
British author Josh Ireland’s new book about the murder of Leon Trotsky tells the gripping story of a rivalry between two very different men.
Ron Capshaw
· 11 min read
History
A collection of 443 posts
Why the Enlightenment Matters
Iona Italia talks to lawyer and historian Adam Wakeling about the enduring importance of Enlightenment values and how to defend them today.
Iona Italia, Adam Wakeling
· 29 min read
Anti-Zionism as Redemptive Racism
Contemporary anti-Zionism encodes a totalising worldview that blends the tributaries of Nazi, communist, and Islamist anti-Zionism into a single stream.
Shalom Lappin
· 15 min read
Treacherous Men
A fabulous new history of the Cambridge Five by Antonia Senior provides the definitive account of Britain’s most famous traitors.
Ronald Radosh
· 12 min read
From Babylon to Eurovision
My nephew's schoolmate sang at Eurovision last week. Here is what the people who booed him don't understand.
Lynda Ben-Menashe
· 6 min read
The Ballad of East and West
In a fascinating new book, historian Anthony Bale vividly reconstructs the brutal, fantastical, and sometimes deeply religious experiences of medieval travellers across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.
Benny Morris
· 13 min read
Nixon Was Right
After all these years, the Communist Party is still handcuffed to its American rival, and it is unable to break free.
Aaron Sarin
· 10 min read
Statecraft and Seduction
In an excellent new biography of Rasputin, British military historian Antony Beevor argues that perception can be a more powerful shaper of world events than reality.
Ron Capshaw
· 9 min read
What Did You Think Decolonisation Meant?
Decolonisation theory operates as a rigid, Manichaean ideology that neatly divides the world into evil perpetrators and innocent victims.
Maarten Boudry
· 7 min read
The UN’s Historically Selective Denunciation of Human Bondage
The transatlantic slave trade was a monstrous crime against humanity. Yet it represented just one example of an ancient evil that spanned many civilisations.
Brian Stewart
· 9 min read
Foreign Power, Local Politics
Where local collaboration is absent, foreign intervention imposes enormous costs or simply stalls. Where it exists, intervention can succeed with surprising velocity.
Pablo Policzer
· 10 min read
Rohmer at Camelot
Éric Rohmer’s Perceval le Gallois (1978) vividly recreates the imaginative world in which the people of the Middle Ages lived inside their heads.
Charlotte Allen
· 22 min read
Communism’s Obsolescence
The structural case for why collectivist systems fail.
Michael Aaron Cody
· 6 min read
What Makes the West Western?
Naoíse Mac Sweeney’s new book tries to convince readers that Western civilisation doesn’t exist.
James Kierstead
· 15 min read
An Ambivalent Relationship
Southeast Asia in World War II, Part Three: Independence Movements under Japanese Occupation
Imran Said
· 22 min read