Clearly these iconic books resulted from intervention on the part of outsiders, who convinced islanders they had something of importance to say. This was consonant with the ideals of cultural romantic nationalism, whose impulse to recognise the richness and depth…

The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia, by Orlando Figes, Allen Lane, 740pp, £25, ISBN: 978-0713997026 “I remember the grey wall of silent people who watched us walk towards the cart. No one moved or said anything … No one hugged us, or said a parting word; they were afraid of the soldiers, who walked…

The banks made supernormal profits and knew that if they ever got into trouble the taxpayer would bail them out. This was a wonderfully easy way of making big money. There were hardly any risks involved as far as bank…

The claims long made in Irish Republican circles of a shoot-to-kill policy are vigorously denied. Andrew states categorically: “There is no evidence in Security Service files that it countenanced or assisted a shoot-to-kill policy in Northern Ireland.” But does this…

The kaiser was a pioneer in the notion of using Turkey as a bridge between Europe and the Islamic world. The events chronicled in this book are not particularly encouraging, being more consistent with Dr Ian Paisley’s insight that the…

Yeats’s interest in Berkeley developed in the 1920s in the context of his appointment to the Irish senate, where he saw himself as a spokesman for the old Protestant previously largely Unionist ascendancy caste. In this context he built up…

Post-Good Friday Agreement rhetoric about the historic “symbiotic bond” between Ireland and England presupposes that both parties were equal beneficiaries of this supposed symbiosis and can lead imperceptibly to a blurring of the conflict, violence, trauma and catastrophe involved in…

It was this man [Edmund Veesenmayer, an agent of the German foreign service] that Kerney met in Madrid in August 1942, without instruction, but probably arising from his role in the freeing of Frank Ryan. Kerney was clearly aware that…

Denis Healey once quipped of Shirley Williams that she needn’t think herself an intellectual just because she had a bad hairdo: Zhemchuzhina would have agreed. Unlike the dishevelled and independent-minded feminists of the Old Bolshevik milieu, by the mid-1930s women…

In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, thousands of Christian converts and missionaries were executed, some of them crucified. In 1637-8, the government suppressed a rebellion of Catholic Samurai warriors and peasants with great brutality and drove the remaining…

Built in 1974, it was put up by Robert McAlpine, who relied on many of those “fusiliers” who had come to Birmingham from Ireland and who played such a key role in constructing the culture and identity of the modern…