Ouch. I think my entire body physically cringed when I came across the latest story of a misjudged tweet gone viral this week: the case of Breanna Mitchell, the naïve teenager and self-styled “Princess…
The BBC Proms, with justification, is flaunted as the world’s largest and most significant annual music festival. A bronze bust of the conductor Sir Henry Wood, is placed in front of the organ facing the…
Booker-shortlisted novelist David Mitchell is currently launching his new short story The Right Sort – on Twitter. The award-winning author of Cloud Atlas and number9dream is tweeting his story twice daily…
Wherever does our prime minister get his technique for historical analysis? Just before last week’s chaotic carbon tax repeal scenes in Canberra, prime minister Tony Abbott offended the People’s Republic…
Karl Marx warned against conjuring up the past to explain the present, but really, we have been somewhere very like the Ukraine before. Benjamin Disraeli stood in the British parliament 150 years ago condemning…
Henry Irving, School of Advanced Study, University of London
“Keep Calm and Carry On” is now one of the most recognisable slogans in British history. Its resilient message has become extraordinarily commonplace, with the phrase used to sell everything from mugs…
Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs … And tell sad stories of the death of kings These melancholic words, uttered by Shakespeare’s Richard II, tell us of a preoccupation with death and mortality…
Richard Strauss saw – and heard – it all. Born before German unification, he lived through two world wars and the division of Germany into East and West, dying that same year, in 1949. Musically he also…
It might seem a stretch to say history has been unkind to the Vandals. After all, this barbarian group did as much as anyone to sound the last rites of the Roman Empire in the west. They captured the rich…
Why is AFL the main sport in Victoria and the other southern States while New South Wales and Queensland follow rugby? That’s long been a vexed question, but we may now be closer to an answer. In Melbourne…
I clearly remember the BBC news on February 23, 1981. The second item concerned an attempted coup in Spain in which armed soldiers marched into the Cortes (parliament) and took its members hostage. Their…
Think of medieval food and a whole range of not especially dignified images come to mind; Monty Python’s Holy Grail has a lot to answer for. Mud was far from being a constituent part of the diet of the…
It’s 50 years since Mods and Rockers rumbled by the sea in Margate, Broadstairs and Brighton; since their images were captured for posterity in iconic black and white photos of deck chairs being thrown…
Spies were a glamour news item in Western (and Soviet) press in the 1960s; it was the age of Kim Philby, British spymaster-cum-Soviet spy, and the endless media hunt for the “fifth man” of the Cambridge…
While communities around the UK commemorate the British “conchies”, it is easy to forget the international dimension, especially when it comes to German anti-war activists. This is partly due to how the…
With the centenary commemorations continuing, all things World War I have been filling our screens, pages and radio waves. The latest of these was the BBC’s The Crimson Field, a drama set in a field hospital…
Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) is easily the most controversial philosopher in the 20th century. To a large extent this is due to his implication in Nazism, which is a scandal to some, a fascinating spectacle…
The government has recently announced changes to the content of GCSE and A level history exams in England. As in previous reforms to the history curriculum, the documents set out the proportion of British…
The coming centenary of the first world war has already prompted some disquiet about a revival of the so-called “history wars”, given the significance of war to ideas of Australian national identity. In…
Thousands of young Australians will gather at Gallipoli this Anzac Day. Our TV screens will fill with faces in the cold light of early dawn, a tear trickling down the cheek in sadness that so many died…