I am so at home in Dublin, more than any other city, that I feel it has always been familiar to me. It took me years to see through its soft charm to its bitter prickly kernel - which I quite like too.

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World History

Semper Invicta

  Warsaw Tales, edited by Helen Constantine and selected and translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Oxford University Press, 256 pp, £12.99, ISBN: 978-0192855565 1/4 h west of Hohenstein on one of the highest points of the battlefield, the Tannenberg National Monument, 193m (shortly before on the road restaurant Tannenbergkrug with the Tannenberg battle relief, in summer […]

The Case for the State

The largely successful growth of the world economy since 1945, which has seen hundreds of millions of people lifted out of poverty and continuing scientific and technological development, has been based on a system of multilateral global governance developed in the aftermath of World War II. That system of governance, which has been taken for […]

Hard Power

Thucydides and the pursuit of domination through warfare

Witness to War

Peadar O’Donnell walks into Franco’s military revolt

The Fascist Precursor

Fiume and the ‘poetic dictatorship’ of Gabriele d’Annunzio

Our Enemies’ Enemies

How the US and the Vatican combined to help Nazis escape justice

Portrait of Fox

Isaiah Berlin did not share the view that philosophy, and particularly practical philosophy, could be coherently pursued independently of history or, more specifically, of a certain historical self-awareness which springs from a knowledge and appreciation of the past.

A World of Tears

A man finds himself in Antwerp with nothing to do. Then he remembers, among other things, that this is the town where the painter Peter Paul Rubens made his home. At first, this annoys him, because he has no interest whatsoever in the painter. But then he thinks, why not write a book about Rubens.

History in a Shoebox

The fashion writer Hadley Freeman came upon a shoebox when rummaging through her grandmother’s wardrobe. The past it hinted of led her on a hunt through the archives that eventually uncovered the tragic and inspiring history of her Jewish family’s experiences in wartime France.

Didn’t They Do Well?

Irish settlers in Argentina saw no contradiction between leaving a country wracked by land conflict and occupying land in the one to which they’d moved from which the native people had been expelled. For they were a civilised people and the dispossessed were savages.