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1488 results

How the British made the NHS their religion

The decay and renewal of the American constitutional order

The Revolt of the European Masses: the disintegration of accountability in supra-national politics

Space and the new struggle for civilisational supremacy

Iain Macleod — short-serving chancellor and lost Tory leader

Sigmar Hillelson — the German Jewish pioneer behind the BBC’s Arabic broadcasts

Russia in 2020: alternative scenarios of the near future

Mobilising for the moment

America’s problem with unconventional warfare

Mental health’s expanding empire

The paradox of liberal individualism

Internationalism’s moral fallacies

Future proof

World order — improvised by design

Realism meets reality

Challenging the ‘Great Reset’ theory of pandemics

An Oceanic Order for the Twenty-First Century

A government of laws

Covid-19 and the moral case for personal judgement

The Elizabethan era is laid to rest

The roots of South Korea’s crisis

Dumbarton Oaks: creating a new world order

What does the future of evolution look like?

The geopolitics and grand strategy of Alfred Thayer Mahan

Doing our duty at home and abroad — A Duty of Care: Britain Before and After Covid by Peter Hennessy review

The constitutional casualties of the French election

Ancient lessons for modern crisis

The Singapore way

To avoid a dictatorship of scholars

The return of great power diplomacy

Rethinking the Meiji Restoration

Inside the disinformation forever war

Did civilisation add to the quality of human life?

The US-Japan alliance – its past, present and unclear future

Did nationalism exist in the classical world?

America’s return as the reluctant defender of the liberal order

Can democracy and genetic engineering co-exist?

Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy revisited

The forgotten lessons of First World War strategy

The crusader of good will

The West needs to wake up

The Soviet military was a hollow colossus

The endless frontier

The Nation in Arms: Myth or reality?

Why Finns Joined The Fight

The Czechoslovak agent in the BBC who almost was

The new struggle for space

Towards an Arcadian future

The fragile equilibrium of technology, liberty and power

As the Arctic thaws, are we able to keep its peace?

Human nature and European civilisation

The future of war is here

Foes into friends: Germany’s role in postwar European integration

2020: Putting our pandemic in perspective

Kamala Harris and the empty language of international order

From broken windows to bulldozers

What the Paris Olympics opening ceremony really meant

The method and madness of Ancient Greek medicine

Trump’s gamble

The Bonn Summit and the road to globalisation

Alternative international orders: a modern Holy Alliance for the twenty-first century

Bringing beauty back to the city

Erdogan prepares to leave the stage

The Australian way of war and peace

Battling for the best and brightest: immigration, great power rivalry, and the history of talent importation

America – nation of myth-makers

How America became the world’s Leviathan

1821 and the invention of world order

Ruling the waves

Why the nation beat the empire in the battle of 19th century ideas

The Spy and the State

When the Founding Fathers opposed the Supreme Court

How mechanical refrigeration changed the world

How 1970s California created the modern world

Why applied history matters

The third way: How different is the Swedish model?

Between Westernisers and Slavophiles – the search for Russia’s soul

Regime change and the breaking of alliances

Breaking the nuclear taboo

Outside in, inside out: Russia as an empire on the periphery

The carrot and the stick — geo-economics and Russian revisionism

Fighting in the shadows

Three victories and a defeat

Vienna: the crucible of the modern world

Globalisation: why it went into retreat

This crisis has the capacity to be apocalyptic

The paradox of nuclear strategy

Geopolitics never went away for the United States

The fake history of civilisational states

Ukraine on the move: a century of migration

China: The great uncoupling

Syria’s rebels won the war – can they win the peace?

America’s National Guard, a history of heroism and violence

How war created the nation state and yet could destroy it

Contradictions at the heart of an expanding Europe

A little history of the modern Middle East

How China learned to love the bomb

The Empire strikes back

A real Russian heart: Aleksandr Dugin, Vladimir Putin and the dangerous new Russian ideology

The Future of Europe: secular but not secularist, diverse but not divided

The timely return of Henry Clay

The US President’s daily dose of intelligence

The price of freedom

Why wars keep happening

Hong Kong’s secret world of spies

A political lesson from Lord Rockingham

Why Scotland lost its tongue

The history of sport contains multitudes

The fall and rise of Marwan Barghouti

The twilight of the Arab state

Why we don’t remember pandemics

The old republic of Europe

To the far side of the Moon: the battle for lunar resources

How Ukraine is winning in the adaptation battle against Russia

Kissinger: the ultimate realist

Reappraising NATO, 1956 style

The flag wars are here to stay

The subtle art of English comedy

Russia’s Scramble for Africa

Meritocracy v the people

The gerontology of power

The war for hearts and minds: the evolution of al-Qaeda’s media strategy

Undersea cables and the vulnerability of American power

Le Pen and France’s past, present and future

The quest for Croatia

An ode to the ODNB

What is the purpose of existence?

Islam and the contingency of politics

The misfortunes of war

Xi Jinping’s moment of truth

Infrastructure power

Continuity Thatcher: rescuing a complex leader from historical cliché

The invention of Catherine the Great

How the British elite lost its way

Bond or Blofeld: war, espionage and secrecy in the twenty-first century

The White Revolutionaries

Digital revolution: a splash in the cognitive space?

Can warfare ever be considered modern?

The road to Auschwitz

The Balkan Question

Towards a Westphalia for the Middle East

The Sandbaggers: the greatest spy show ever?

Traitorous Blake motivated by Cold War convictions

Total football — from catenaccio to gegenpressing it’s about openness to ideas

When disaster strikes

Sport is more than just a game

‘We need to see these terrorist groups through their own mindsets’ — in conversation with John Sawers

The many meanings of culture

Tradition meets aesthetics: the meaning of modern rituals

From Saartjie Baartman to Dolly the Sheep: what does genetic integrity mean?

The Slavic War according to Stalin

From miracles to massacres – Japan’s tumultuous 20th century

The Saddam files and the battle for Iraqi history

Between frustrated Wagnerians and unsatisfied Schopenhauerians – what does Nietzsche reveal about decadence?

Geopolitics of a pandemic

The Arab Awakening: when the dream met reality

The making of modern Ukraine

The looming crisis of an Electoral College tie

A world of nations and states is here to stay

How US policy failure post-9/11 undermined international order

A tale of three generals — how the Ukrainian military turned the tide

Tony Blair and the tragedy of liberal interventionism

The indispensable foreign correspondent

Power and prudence in American statecraft

Jacques Rueff’s quest for monetary order

Seeing the big picture — how Russia’s past guides its grand strategy

Imagining the endgame of the US-China rivalry

What did it mean to belong to the Holy Roman Empire?

The last days of the Fifth Republic

How companies go to war

Rousseau and the barbarity of education

Great Books: E.H. Carr’s Nationalism and After

Minority report

The making of an 18th-century peace deal

Karel Čapek’s robots took on a life of their own

Wise warnings matter even more in this age of pandemics and big data

Spies as agents of peace

What is mistake theory and can it save the humanities?

An uncertain idea of Britain

Welcome to the fifth age of the city

Orwell in all weathers

How Jewish leaders have defied the political odds

Ukraine’s success in Kharkiv forced Putin’s hand

Learning from the big, bold 1990s debates over the post-Cold War world

Armenia’s existential moment

The swift death of Gorbachev’s USSR set Russia on a path to chaos

The Houthis’ forgotten war goes global

Thucydides was a Realist

The conflict between states and the US federal government is nothing new

Rewiring the world

Japanese architecture – building the impossible

Meet the Zoomer generation

Why human agency matters

Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin — the first and only British woman to win a Nobel Prize in science

The intelligent use of history — what is the past good for?

The Caliphate: the persistence of a brutal ideology

Four paths to Israel’s intelligence failure

Imperial Miasma Theory

Hacktivism’s Cold War Turns Hot

Books of the Year

Information war does not exist

How to do statecraft

American democracy can help fix America’s broken society

The human need for war

The restless search for fun wars

Christopher Coker, 1953-2023

The idea of Syria is worth saving

Rethinking geopolitics

Four reasons to study Polybius — most practical of ancient historians

Liberty at risk as threats to freedom grow

Finding Garibaldi

The cultural conversation of mankind

How Arcadia was won and lost and found again

Christopher Lasch – contrarian critic of America’s elites

Geopolitics of the tempest

Books of the Year 2024

How private intelligence companies became the new spymasters

The visionary potential of the Biblical legacy

How to fix the future, Estonian style

The deep historical roots of Russia’s militarisation of the Arctic

On civility

John Perry Barlow and the struggle for the independence of cyberspace

The new space race: Africa’s cosmic ambitions

Inside Russia’s forever war against Ukraine

On the myth of multiculturalism

Why America goes to war

Ukraine and the West: an alliance by proxy

Frederick Selous, the archetypal great white hunter

Can the US make the world safe for democracy?

Nuclear war must become unthinkable — again

Kharkiv’s culture unbowed

Trust is the key to geopolitical strength

In the shadow of George Wallace: America’s third-party challenge

Lawrence of Arabia on war: How the past haunts the present

Can Europe come to NATO’s defence?

Macron’s very French gambit

Containing and deterring Russia: can Europe act strategically?

Where does esotericism belong in modern academia and what is its purpose?

Modern France and the ghosts of the past

The strange death of private life

What drives Vladimir Putin?

The Passion of Hilma af Klint

Dealing with the past – a Russian history

Liberty under attack from enemies within

The age of gerontocracy is nothing new

Nehemiah Wallington – Puritan chronicler had far less fun than Pepys

Head, hand and heart

Gustav Stresemann — The man who almost saved the world

How bro-world conquered America

Getting the CIA in working order

The malevolent spirit of Ebrahim Raisi

The spies make their case

Five Eyes: the past, present and future of the world’s key intelligence alliance

Kissinger: a man of three centuries

Jimmy Carter, orphan of the American Century

Eugene Onegin’s entropic beauty

Counting the cost of the 1918-19 pandemic

Inside Russia’s forever war with the West

De Gaulle’s world in motion

Georgian nightmare

Ukraine, the future of war is now

Britain’s war requiem

An intimate glimpse of President Trump

The Habsburg world we have lost

Why Assad’s fall took the world by surprise

Austria: nation, state or empire?

How Israel reset the energy map

The end of the Atlanticist Era

Japan, AUKUS and the future of Western defence

China’s innovation paradox

Inside the Collective Unconscious

The Church of the Almost Believers

The problem of power in Russia

The past, an enduring guide to the future

The revolutionary meaning of Maundy Thursday

Equality – what is it good for?

Is there hope for Russia after Putin?

The vitality of Western civilisation

How the state can do more for less

Charles Johnston: British diplomat who used a poet’s eye to fix the final phase of empire

The high price of Trump’s energy

Democracy in crisis: Lessons from Ancient Athens

Noël Coward the spy

How LBJ stepped back

Henry Kissinger at 100: a century of service

Richard Aldington — the war poet who rejected moral certainties about conflict

Kafka’s goodbye to Berlin

How to revive our reading culture

The triumph of the Motherland

Sir Alexander Cadogan — Churchill’s indispensable man

The Queen, Stoicism and the defence of the Faith

America must find its middle ground

Pope Leo XIII, steward of a vanished world

The story of the Jesuits — how the Society of Jesus charted the world

Robert Adam and building beautiful

On guard: the contemporary salience of military fortification

George Orwell’s idea of civilisation

The Platinum Jubilee — the joys of Pomp and Circumstance

Ukraine can win the peace

How to negotiate with China

Terror, misperception and America’s road to Iraq

The enduring mystery of the Zinoviev Letter

EI Weekly Listen — Andrew Preston on the invention of American national security

EI Weekly Listen — Philip Bobbitt on the decay and renewal of the US constitutional order

Europe’s reckoning with history

Irrational Rationalists: Pythagoras matters

J.M. Coetzee’s absence without leave

Is our religion of love doing more harm than good?

Great Power competition is going nuclear again

Joe Biden and the long shadow of the Vietnam War

France fragmented

1975, the year that made the modern world

Yosano Akiko — a great of modern Japanese poetry

Making sense of the Yemen War

George Carver, the CIA’s man in Vietnam

The march of the sovereign individuals

The gods in love

Hamas takes the nihilistic path of Islamist terror

Britain’s energy transition in the shadow of the 1970s

Why Putin is haunted by the spectre of Polish power

Europe needs a grand strategy

Navigating the new nuclear age

Christianity in a cold climate – Jesuit encounters with Japan

Ernest Bevin and the spiritual dimension of British foreign policy

What makes a man die for his country?

Who’s seeing your data and why?

The world that saltpetre built

Will machines make strategy?

Peak China may be closer than we think

In search of Lebensraum

When did sexual decadence lose its association with social decline?

Daniel Patrick Moynihan: Warrior of the liberal centre

The Monarchy International

What pushed Sweden away from socialism?

Walk on the wild side

Inside the world of medieval espionage

Reassessing Christian history

Matisse’s second life

Confucius, competition and modern China’s misuse of meritocracy

The golden age of the supernatural

Betty Webb, the humble codebreaker who helped to defeat the Nazis

Know your enemy

Angus MacLean – father, soldier, liberator

Canada cannot escape geopolitics

The bitter legacy of Israel’s West Bank settlement

Fighting for freedom against the odds

The quest for an American honours system

The economy and the paradox of technology

History while it’s still smoking

Globalisation — lessons from George Canning on how to remake trade

Gazing back to see China’s future

The Stalinist who wrote the playbook for French foreign policy

The People’s Republic of SF

Palestine, pragmatism and the lessons of 1956

Russia’s century of scientific autarky

History shows a perilous path lies ahead for Kamala Harris

Saxony and the return of the Third Germany

A team of rivals empowers a president

Russia’s global grip on nuclear energy

When free trade falters

Joachim Burwitz, spymaster of the Baltic world

Troubled waters

Middle Powers: don’t write off Britain and Japan

Jane the Virgin: Metafictional telenovela par excellence

The trials of a president

Conducting is Finland’s soft superpower

Putin’s Game: How did so many in the West get Russia so wrong?

Locked arms: looming threats to the Romania-NATO partnership

City-states are back

Geopolitics — the key to understanding Russia foreign policy

The Eurasian Century, Part IV: Cold War

How manga shapes Japanese identity

Ignacio Sánchez Mejías — sensationalist matador who brought celebrity to the corrida

Have Realists lost their way?

AI’s attention deficit

Fiction for a future war

Why do democracies decay?

What does Xi Jinping really think?

The Entente Cordiale: bad history but good politics

Puccini’s battle of darkness and light

Will AI revolutionise education?

Playing with demons — how thought experiments guide scientific innovation

The West needs to boost its industrial capacity fast

The centrist as saviour

In search of Mitteleuropa’s lost nobility

Living with the Great Plague of 1665

Macaulay and the lost optimism of Victorian history

Untold knowledge: the price of deforestation

The dissident’s dilemma

Spirit-lands and tyrant-kings: differing tales of statehood

Russia’s tragedy is a warning to us all

Taking Pushkin off his pedestal

Japan’s time of monsters

The beatification of Prigozhin and the fight for the future of Russia

The new great power competition for minerals

The art of Siena: a question of perspective

Alasdair MacIntyre’s philosophy for a new dark age

George McGhee – American father to Britain’s Suez Crisis

The mythical Burma of Maurice Collis

Fritz Mannheimer – stockbroker of peace

Authority without knowledge

Tobias Smollett – a life in caricature

Queen Elizabeth II — the end of a glorious reign

Napoleonic Europe: how the Emperor built a continent

Russell Leffingwell – guardian of the American century

Leadership in crisis – why the West needs Plato more than ever

From the Silk Road to the information superhighway

Information loss

Lifting Italy’s classical music curse

Banishing Pétain’s ghost

Israel’s hostage dilemma

Julian ‘the Apostate’: antiquity’s most prolific self-publicist

Ismail Kadare walked the line

Margaret Thatcher – the fall, thirty years on

Ernest Benn against the Census and the forces of Bumbledom

The honourable men of the House of Morgan – J.P Morgan & Co and the Crisis of Capitalism by Martin Horn review

In defence of the Habsburgs

Decline in three dimensions

Careless posts cost lives

Civilisation and Auschwitz are not a contradiction in terms

History’s soundtrack: America’s swinging musical diplomacy

The greatest sportsman you have never heard of

What Israel does next — in conversation with Dennis Ross

Did the Enlightenment fail?

The long war between Israel and Hizbollah

The hidden lives of Samurai women

The many ways of seeing Saint Monica

Enid Bagnold — trailblazing novelist whose greatest novel launched Elizabeth Taylor’s career

EI Weekly Listen — the fake history of civilisational states by Christopher Coker

EI Weekly Listen — The Revolt of the European Masses: the disintegration of accountability in supra-national politics by Janne Haaland Matlary

The enduring spirit of cricket

The other side of the hill

The Suez Canal Purchase and the making of modern Britain

Armenia, Azerbaijan on the brink – again

The end of history ends

Thomas Jefferson’s spirit of scientific endeavour is what America needs today

The beginning of a reckoning: the Middle East after 7 October

America’s retreat from free trade

The Genocide Convention and its discontents

A Russian nation struggles to be born

The importance of the individual in history

China’s takeover of Western capitalism

Adam Smith: the first anti-capitalist?

Chemical weapons and war: the growing threat

Show goes on for Ukrainian opera

Will Georgia’s geopolitical hedging pay off?

Who are the Basques?

South Korea’s crisis could be a geopolitical catastrophe

The price of Iran’s nuclear prestige

Why liberal democracies win total wars

German resistance to sending Leopards will be long remembered

Epic news

Do we really know what war is anymore? — The Weaponisation of Everything: A Field Guide To The New Way of War by Mark Galeotti review

Reclaiming Christian freedom for the modern age

Vienna’s vapour trail

JFK’s abiding legacy

Inside Iran’s election circus

The crisis of progressivism

A most rebellious territory

Peter Viereck: Psychoanalyst of Nazism

The fraught history of the presidential pardon

Pamela Harriman: an unsung hero of the Atlantic world

Decolonising Britain’s countryside

When Dickens made his masterpiece

Baudelaire grappling with God

Resilient London will regenerate

The spirit of Hilary Mantel

Irina Ratushinskaya — Soviet dissident who fought the good fight

Was Horace a town or a country mouse?

The magic of Thomas Mann

Privacy Policy

The beginning of the end for the Cambridge Five

General James Oglethorpe — a man of uncommon vivacity

The shifting fortunes of IS-Khorasan

The City of God: on Augustine’s vision of Empire

Business burble doesn’t beat real historical understanding

The Slow Horses are Britain’s perfect spies

Was Richard Sorge the perfect spy?

The shadow of Chiang Kai-shek and the struggle for Taiwanese identity

Celebrating a century of the red telephone box

The anatomy of the spy novel

Everything is not really okay in Afghanistan

God is back

Why Jihadists write poetry

Oswald Spengler – an intellectual life

Abba and engineering: how Swedish music took over the world

What if Bach and Handel had met?

The roots of cyber security lie in the City of London

Prisoner of Putin

How to make a nation

Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, the uncrowned King of Poland

Irish neutrality is unsustainable

The French Revolution and the making of the Counter-Enlightenment

Blood on the Tracks turns 50

Will Trump’s Golden Age be a Gilded one?

The roots of America’s oil anxiety

Syria’s sectarian trap

Eisenhower’s vision of European security

How Nato can defend the Atlantic

First in their field — the men and women possessed by the spirit of adventure

EI Weekly Listen — Pascal Vennesson on the rise of transnational war-making

Somaliland’s race for recognition

Making Poland great again

Basil Liddell Hart and the Art of Peace

Europe’s contested borders by BMW

Europe’s last Latin kingdom

Sweden and Finland forced into the NATO fold by Russia

How ideology transformed the early modern individual

The old man: the political genius who made Singapore

Israel’s new Yom Kippur

Explaining the Golden Era

The sublime hubris of Tropical Modernism

America’s European security dilemma is nothing new

Lebanon’s ceasefires without end

Nazism’s downfall and the aftermath of war

Machiavelli and the benefits of civil strife

China rethinking its role

Do we know the truth about the Thirty Years’ War?

Jean Denis, Comte Lanjuinais – fearless opponent of The Terror

Painting the invisible

World Cup has revealed the real Lionel Messi

Russia, America and the roads not taken

EI Weekly Listen — Philip Bobbitt on the new global disorder

India sends Modi a message

Operetta’s world of invention

The European Union’s coming ideological crisis

Ukraine in Kursk: a lesson in strategic audacity

Mozambique at the crossroads

Bruce Springsteen’s Spanish love affair

Artists of the floating world

Fire in the sky — a history of meteoritics

Made in Taiwan: How Developing Countries Can Leverage High Tech

The many worlds of Peter Brown

Venezuela’s Essequibo gamble

A deep history of Canadian populism

In search of Denmark’s soul

The perils of partition

The American dream making a come back

Algorithms vs Humanity

Rudolf II: Habsburg hoarder, failed leader and Renaissance collector

The Vault of Heaven: Silvio Berlusconi’s final resting place

Eleanor of Provence, a force to be reckoned with

China’s AI Sputnik moment is not what it seems

On dandyism

Jesse Ventura – the wrestling governor who blazed a trail for Trump

A Year in Ideas

How a Second Cold War could have been averted

Jules Verne’s paradoxes of progress

The world in 2024

South Korea between the great powers

Gardens for all

Gustaf Mannerheim, leader of a free Finland

Tunisia turns away from democracy

On the dangers of sleep

On ostracism

EI Weekly Listen – Mark Honigsbaum: Challenging the ‘Great Reset’ theory of pandemics

How it all went wrong for Stephen Tomlin

Daniel Defoe’s journeys of the mind

A little history of Shin Bet

Securing Scandinavia

The medieval world’s Baltic connection

Britain’s man inside Hitler’s inner circle

Philippa Fawcett – wrangler extraordinaire

Elizabeth the Dutiful

Inside Mossad

The transatlantic alliance is fractured, not broken

Krystyna Skarbek, Churchill’s favourite spy

Étienne Clavière – the revolutionary who hated revolution

Singing Byrd in a cage

The Teddy Boys’ two-fingered salute

Palau – 5 November’s other election

The helicopter, symbol of American hubris

Victor Hugo’s ideal of Europe

Russian history rhymes — from Soviet collapse to Putin’s folly

The lost art of listening

An innovative analysis of global terrorism — Western Jihadism: A Thirty Year History by Jytte Klausen review

Element of surprise — the West needs to be more unpredictable

Binding order and liberty: Tocqueville the politician

Tsiang Tingfu – pre-revolutionary China’s last bridge with the West

Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan — for Xi, it’s personal

The moderate life of Decimus Magnus Ausonius

Upstairs, downstairs, demolished – the changing fate of the English country house

Against pasta: remembering The Manifesto of Futurist Cooking

Disraeli and the Rothschilds provide a study in the power of political patronage

Larkin, prophet of postmodernism

When JS Bach came to Leipzig

Islam, India and the question of class

Russian fortifications present an old problem for Ukraine

Paolo Sarpi: opponent of papal power

On Jewish identity

The long fall of the Slavic nation

Space architecture: a moonage daydream?

How Beate Klarsfeld grappled with Europe’s demons

Ukraine alone

Interest rates, mankind’s greatest invention

Erdogan’s pious generation takes to the streets

The merits of a wartime mentality

The Gospel of Thomas: casting a new light on Early Christianity

EI Weekly Listen — America’s problem with unconventional warfare by Frederick Kagan

EI Weekly Listen — How US policy failure post-9/11 undermined international order by Emma Sky

The Rhinegold, Wagner’s other comedy

Europe’s eastward march

Putin’s Russia is a nuclear outlaw

Putin’s Poison Pill

Putin’s propaganda is parroting Al-Qaeda’s anti-Western grievances

Rewriting Spanish history, one song at a time

Jean Eustache: the outsider who reshaped French cinema

Argentina’s post-Peronist future

A Cold War with Chinese characteristics

The deep history and dangers of just wars

Inside Sudan’s forever war

Germany stands by the rule of law in the Baltic

Yugoslavia and the ghosts of nationalism

Dürer in Venice

Olympe de Gouges: the recalcitrant revolutionary

God Bless America: A Short History of the Super Bowl Halftime Show

How the idea of America changed Britain

Can nuclear deterrence preserve the Long Peace between major powers?

Putin sees himself as engaged in an existential war with the West

Dance first, think afterwards

Why Zelenskyy fired Zaluzhnyi

The true sources of Soviet conduct

Sinwar’s death among the ruins

How Iran’s Tanker War shaped Trump’s worldview

The power of the Blue Marble

Paul Kennedy in conversation on the rise of a new era of great power competition

Myths and realities of Putinism and NATO expansion

New Turkey’s old politics

Statecraft for an age of blood and iron — The Strategy of Denial: American Defence in an Age of Great Power Conflict by Elbridge Colby review

Ancient creations: from the Antikythera Mechanism to Western music

Chiang Ching-kuo — dictator or democrat?

Hostile neighbours and a parallel path: why Japan and Germany are rearming

Haiti and the pathos of history

Charles III — why not make him King-Emperor of Europe?

Germany in Europe: the engine that couldn’t

Russia’s quest for polar power

China-US rivalry risks dividing the EU

Attlee’s shadow

Surrealism — a monstrous creation

The Germans and their cars: history of a love affair

After Hilma af Klint: the influence of Theosophy on contemporary art

Russia’s shadow war for Eastern Europe

The politics of China’s purges

Sylvia Beach, the bookseller who defied the Nazis

John Craxton’s art of living

De László’s portraits of society still matter

The strange death of Scotland’s political virtues

More than just a moment: the deep roots of American populism

Our attention dilemma is age-old

The other plot to kill Hitler

How Russia and Iran have united in antipathy towards the West

Khorloogiin Choibalsan — Stalin of the steppe

Janusz Korczak — the Old Doctor of Warsaw

Where has ‘the good life’ gone?

Kids these days

Are we ready for the new humans?

Giovanni Bellini, the soul of Venice

Crusading women

The Nazis’ last victims

All hail King Zog?

The psychedelic renaissance

Christianity’s carnal contradictions

The Trump effect

The Napoleonic myth of la méritocratie

The British have lost the art of eating out

Thomas Phelippes, the perfect Elizabethan spy

The art and science of intelligence in war

After the Flood: Boulanger’s creation myth restored

The secrets of the special relationship

In defence of the city-state

John le Carré: the timeless allure of a true literary great

Remembering Liu Xiaobo’s moral critique of modern China

Robert Louis Stevenson knew about guerrilla warfare

Frank Kitson and the myth of the counter-insurgent

Spies, lies and empires

China and America, the great decoupling

Europe’s lost peasant utopias

Alexander Helphand — impresario of revolutionary disaster who smoothed Lenin’s return to Russia

Uruk and the origins of the sacred economy

America’s Afghan reckoning

Parallel visionaries – Hilla Rebay and Hilma af Klint

A ship without a captain — Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union by Vladislav Zubok review

Ukraine is the latest disaster in a long history of Russian military dysfunction

Inventing the Samurai

The aesthetic harmony of Japanese nature

Why do politicians get energy policy wrong?

On tea

Plautus punching up: a different class of comedy

How War Made Odessa More Ukrainian

Epitaph on a mafioso’s grave

The ins and outs of the European project

Yet another flight across the Durand Line

When everything is empire

How the Nazis weaponised Charlemagne

The wages of Putin’s war

Going with the grain: the rise and fall of the Roman market

How advertising consumed the counter-culture

The Statue of Liberty’s Egyptian origins

The Knights Templars and the pursuit of Christendom

The perils of Russian stability under Putin

In conversation with Fiona Hill on Donald Trump’s nuclear nightmares

Crisis, settlement, or containment — what is to be done on Russia?

The case for a geopolitics of tragedy

Macron stands apart from the United States – and Europe

Caravaggio’s last stand

The death of Tsarist Russia and the creation of modern Ukraine

The UN has failed Lebanon

The Kaiser and the Nazis

Marine Le Pen’s reckoning

What should we do when the terrorists go quiet?

Geopolitics and the Mongol Empire

The first Yugoslav

Show’s over: the case against a cultural boycott of Russia

The century of the gene

Why bittersweet beats SOUR

Good poetry in a crisis

Survival lessons from Ancient Rome

The birth of theosophy

Heinrich Biber — composer of rapture and ravings

Roger Federer rose above our frenetic times

French and British cinema in wartime: subtlety against the odds

The liberation of France made the modern world

John Hersey’s lasting testament

Fearing Russia’s futures

How China made it

Mullā Ṣadrā, Islam’s greatest modern philosopher

Italy’s dubbing delusions

Tehran’s endgame

The triumph and tragedy of Yukio Mishima

Must Europe always take every opportunity to miss an opportunity?

John Law, the man who blew up the French economy

William Shockley — accidental inventor of Silicon Valley

Unipolar America: another imperial delusion ends

What the Silicon Valley idealists got wrong

The Joint Intelligence Committee: Reading the Russian mindset

Time running out in China’s waiting game — The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order by Rush Doshi review

Rosaleen Norton — joyful contrarian and occultist turned pioneer for free speech

War displaces Ukrainians – again

Valeriy Lobanovskyi: The greatest football coach you’ve never heard of

A world without glamorous Shanghai is the poorer for it

The joy of suffering

Defeat in Ukraine dooms Putin’s distorted historical worldview

Simon Leys — the cosmopolitan scholar who broke the rules of Sinology

Cyprian Ekwensi: Lagos life in the raw

Mustang: the heart of Nepal’s China dream

Airports have changed – for the worse

Russia’s unbearable frontline burden

The terrible dilemmas of leadership in a thermonuclear world

America cannot ignore the Middle East

What the Romans did for the US

Books of the Year 2023

J.G.A. Pocock’s roads not taken

The magic of Merchant Ivory

Six Tudor lives in their own right

The agony and the ecstasy of Andy Murray

Unpicking imperial history

Heavenly ambitions and earthly ruin: the lessons of the Taiping Rebellion

The Syrian war never really ended

The era of Taylor Swift

Ghosts of the old Middle East

Sweden’s Zeitenwende

Iranian cinema against the Islamic Republic

Reading the map of love

Russia digging in for a long war with the West

Four steps to surviving the Russia crisis

The eighteenth-century technological awakening of artist adventurers

Remembering Wilhelm Furtwängler

Sweden’s swinging sixties

In defence of shareholder democracy

When the Samurai came to America

In Praise of The Fast Show

The double agent who introduced Japan to the West

The squandered promise of Willie Wilde

Fanfare for Ukraine

Gerald of Wales, chronicler of the Celtic world

The last chance for Sudan

Reform and the long shadow of the Fourth Party

The tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV

Giovannino Guareschi: Italian Orwell

Joe Biden and the attractions of Augustine

Crisis and the creation of great art

Raïssa Maritain: more than a mystic

Learning from Asian philosophies of rebirth

The truth shall set us free

Chequered history of ministries of all the talents

Benedict XVI: God’s Rottweiler, the Pope who retired

The Vedic Canon

The fight to save the trees of Paris

The creative industrial complex

1524: The year beer came to England

The life and deaths of Joseph Conrad

Versailles’ splendour unbounded

The 18th century way of war

What the Taliban did next

Mrs Dalloway’s war wounds

What is England really made of?

EI Talks… a new world of intelligence

Testament to doomed media

How Tolstoy immortalised Russia’s Caucasus forever war

A glimpse of Edwardian splendour

Aspasia of Miletus – queen of the Athenian salon

Joseph Leclerc du Tremblay – the original éminence grise

Spartacus, history’s nowhere man

The special role that never was

Marion Dönhoff: the very best of Germany

The enduring secret to Cyrus the Great’s success

The dark spectacle of American political violence

New towns, old problems

‘Slippery Sam’ — Britain’s man in Madrid

Illuminated by Sidney Lumet, beyond reasonable doubt

The war against printing

Klára Dán — esoteric intellect who wrote the first modern computer code

‘Everything is Ukraine’ — Ukraine’s long search for a homeland

Joseph Galloway – the forgotten Founding Father

The Middle East: Kissinger’s masterpiece?

Olympism: magic, myths and mega-events

The Gospel according to Judas

Great Books: I Viceré by Federico De Roberto

Sanctions as potent yet unwieldy weapons of war

The year the West woke up

The Kremlin has its eyes on Gagauzia

A Roman Feast

Laughing with the Face of God

Pensions in a time of kings

The true genius of automata

Quintus Fabius Cunctator: a general who stands askew in the pantheon of Roman heroes

Edwin Walker: deep-state conspirator

Canada’s Pacific railway: an iron spine for a paper nation

Commemorating Portugal’s ambiguous revolution

Interwar architecture was much more than modernism

The magnificent unreality of Barbara Comyns

Messiaen’s many mutations

How women made Benjamin Disraeli

The Olympic moment

Why do we get the wrong leaders?

Learning the lessons of the 1982 Lebanon War

The Great French Songbook

The tragic decline of Christian rituals

India’s new iconoclasts

Martin Luther’s wise protector

The intoxicating humanism of Truffaut’s Les 400 Coups

Fantasy in Middle Eastern nation-making

The miracle of refugee musicians

The Eurasian Century, Part I: What Mackinder Knew

The Eurasian Century, Part V: Beijing’s Gambit

Elizabeth Thompson — military artist whose star rose and fell with the British Empire

EI Weekly Listen — What did it mean to belong to the Holy Roman Empire?

EI Weekly Listen — Geopolitics never went away for the United States

Worldview — The future of the museum

Worldview — The Return of Applied History

Czechoslovakia at the centre of history

EI Talks… Machiavelli

A musical masterpiece

EI Talks… Israel’s harrowing week and the consequences for the Middle East

Can Erdogan keep up his Middle East balancing act?

EI Talks… Tecumseh and the Shawnee Confederacy

Flights of fantasy

EI Weekly Listen — Yu Jie on the deep historical roots of China’s global ambition

How LBJ forged the US-Israel alliance

How numbers came to Europe

EI Weekly Listen — David Frum on how empire-states are changing the game

EI Talks… Caravaggio

Learning the right lessons from Ukraine’s naval war

The Holy Alliance was doomed to be brittle

EI Portraits — Rana Mitter on Tsiang Tingfu, pre-revolutionary China’s last bridge with the West

EI Weekly Listen — Kentaro Fujimoto on Japan’s global future

EI Weekly Listen — Kristin Ven Bruusgaard on the paradox of nuclear strategy

EI Talks… why Europe needs a grand strategy with Marina E. Henke

EI Weekly Listen — Andreas Rödder on Konrad Adenauer and the German realignment

The pitfalls of hindsight

What Zelensky can learn from Syngman Rhee

The making of Trump’s worldview

China vs the WTO: The Inside Story

The West’s lust for liberty

Learning in Italy

Macron’s France is remaking itself again

The nuclear dilemma: deterrence works, up to a point

History shows revolutions are a disaster

Empire and development in First Millennium Europe

HIMARS permit Ukrainians to fight how they know best — a strategy of corrosion

A garden of schizophrenics

Blessed are the cheesemakers

Putin bets the Russia house on the Donbas rustbelt

The two Elizabeths

The Eurasian Century, Part III: The Totalitarian Challenge

How the West can drive a wedge between India and Russia

John Hughes and the making and unmaking of the American dream

Putin’s land war — cautionary lessons from Ancient Greece

Low power: how self-sufficient Sweden jeopardised its energy security

Meteorites: our fascination with the ultimate antique

How Elizabeth II created the role of the modern monarch

A brief history of the fatwa

Worldview — what is the future of the West?

How the individual invented the modern West

EI Weekly Listen — Towards a Westphalia for the Middle East by Brendan Simms

Can Epic Poetry Revive History?

Beware the Ides of August

The rise and fall of the Creek Confederacy

An endless dialogue between past and present

A paean to Shane MacGowan

Conservatism and the sceptical enlightenment

Russia: Nation of floods

A Hollywood treasure trove

Venezuela faces the music

The worlds of the Japanese woodblock

Censorship in the cradle of democracy

Kate Bush, English lionheart

Russia’s North Korean connection

America’s historical overload

Greenland: Denmark’s post-colonial dilemma

The status quo powers strike back

What happened to the politician’s moustache?

England’s unusual individualism

A tale of two Congos

Trump the caudillo

Southeast Asia – between Trump and China

How the Vatican does geopolitics

The rise of the gerontocrats

Italy the mediator’s crush on Russia

The future of war: embrace the new, remember the old

Human behaviour will still determine who wins wars

The dark side to loving a group

The geopolitical fight to come over green energy

Imperial Germany – mighty aristocracy or modern meritocracy?

John McDonald – poker-playing popularizer of game theory

Brick is best

In Defence of the Literary Critic

György Kurtág contemplates his endgame

Lucretius’ life-saving poem

How history’s quest for truth became a call to action

2023: The revenge of history

Roald Dahl’s readable but regrettable Uncle Oswald

Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and the humanity of history

The lost worlds of Raphael Samuel

Cinematic journeys in old-time Finland

The founding father of a future Russia

Orkney: ‘the most dangerous place of all Christendom’

An early modern guide to information overload

War and the Proms

Archives among the ashes

How the Print Revolution created a market of ideas

The West’s year of living anxiously

Bob Dylan, the last of the best

The use and abuse of the Cuban Missile Crisis

Turner’s genius for technology

On squalor

Gatsby, still great at 100

How monks shaped Christendom

Why we make lists

Champagne supernova

For the love of wine

Tender is the night

Philip Thicknesse — libertine turned ornamental hermit

The beauty of municipal swimming pools

On Richelieu’s cats

Inauguration and the power of American ritual

Painting by numbers

A little history of the Fierce Goddess

The ancient Egyptians and birds — history of a fascination

Nouvelle Cuisine made food better

Napoleon’s trouble on the home front

How the GDR fell in love with the West

On the Road with Alexis de Tocqueville

A New Breed of Hobby Horse

Folke Hero

Grey zones and dark tourism in Europe’s hinterlands

The making of Xi Jinping, China’s absolute monarch

The looming battle for succession in Iran

At the crossroads of religion and science

Why children eat books up

Wild stories of medieval women

The decline and fall of period drama

The Great Siege of Malta through Ottoman eyes

The spiritual world of The White Lotus

Wandering through the Carpathian Mountains

The maverick genius of Georges Bizet

England’s mystical inheritance

The invention of suburbia

What Mary Shelley did in the shadows

Cookie Policy

Late Beauties of the British Empire

MI9 – Helen Fry on wartime escape

ChatGPT: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

The fight for the heart of Istanbul

The Wars of the Roses and the problem with private armies

The ‘secretaries’ of MI6

We are legion

How not to fight a war in Russia

The price of fairness

René of Anjou — an Arthurian king

Stuck in Herbert’s Temple

‘The Day Of The Jackal’: How far was fiction from reality?

The right path — the complexities of transporting lethal aid to Ukraine

The passion of Bach

The true history of the Wagner Group

Why dictators fall

Blinded by the light

The cloak-and-dagger intrigue of Italian presidential elections

Why Jihadis are drawn to Khorasan

Akinpelu Obisesan — a gentleman diarist in colonial Africa

Digital dictatorship: a brutal examination of the UAE

The world that Vasco da Gama built

The strong armed philosophy of the Chinese state isn’t new

Brendan Bracken – ‘more Churchillian than Churchill’

Cubans are losing their fear

You are not as clever as you think

Technology transfer across the ages

Ukraine and Russia: how closeness turned into war

George Orwell’s idea of technology

When artists retrain

Fighting back against Russia — the return of propaganda

Spoken history: the modern importance of indigenous cultures

Inside Cromwell’s New Model Army

Between Hitler and Mussolini: The agony of Pope Pius XII

Anti-nuclear bomb Germany changing its mind

Germany’s 1960s slide into political violence is a warning

Great Books: William Golding’s The Spire

The new Warsaw Pact

How Classics captured the Chinese imagination

In defence of architecture

The Return of Russia’s Soviet Past

In pursuit of greatness: from Troy to Westminster

Italy’s strangely seductive culture of mediocrity

Crossing America’s big country

OpenAI’s dual personality disorder

The paradoxes of Ireland’s imperial past

Martin Niemöller’s stand against Hitler

Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell – visions of a vanished Britain

For the common good

A too democratic university

When Edo became Tokyo

Music in Auschwitz

Charles Lamb’s literary alter ego

The revolt of Germany’s working class

Cecil Beaton’s gardens of Eden

Thomas Mann’s cathedrals in prose

Whit Stillman’s comedies of manners

The secret life of hemp

Italy: Mother of all invention

Putin needs ‘General Frost’ on his side to win in Ukraine

Why the idea of Carthage survived Roman conquest

Swedish leaders and a lesson in hubris

Duality, determinism and demography: The Greeks on geopolitics

Shaping society — The Making of Our Urban Landscape by Geoffrey Tyack review

Great Books: The Golden String by Bede Griffiths

Nothing like a midsummer sacrifice

Nepal’s shifting loyalties — All Roads Lead North: China, Nepal and the Conquest for the Himalayas by Amish Raj Mulmi review

An unlikely artistic alliance: the wartime Britons who saved and celebrated German art

Kazakhstan’s Russia problem

Fratelli d’Italia’s Burning Flame — why the medium is the message for Giorgia Meloni

EI Weekly Listen — Geopolitics, geoeconomics and Russian revisionism by Mikael Wigell

EI Weekly Listen — Elements of seapower, past and present by Lincoln Paine

EI Weekly Listen — Russia and geopolitics by Anna-Lena Laurén

Worldview — the Eurasian century

EI Weekly Listen — Alexander Lee on Machiavelli and civil strife

EI Weekly Listen – Tim Marshall: New Turkey’s old politics

EI Weekly Listen — Clive Aslet: The changing fate of the English country house

EI Weekly Listen – Philip Bobbitt: A government of laws

The Eurasian Century, by Hal Brands

Meritocracy Week

The infinite delight of Italo Calvino

What is the British Army for?

Succession: the end of the line

Championing Opera’s Next Generation

Cannes: festival of freedom

The mighty Dnieper’s war stories

Karabakh is no more

Stopping the Exodus: an impossible task

How Bernstein loved the impossible

How Sweden’s NATO bid became a geopolitical bargaining chip

Spinoza’s radical enlightenment

Janáček’s small-town world

‘We were there with the history makers, really finding out what they thought and felt’ – in conversation with Norma Percy

Keith Murdoch, the patriarch

Victor Erice’s lost time

The madness of crowds

Did Tiberius have a grand strategy?

To top it with the best of them

The dark beauty of Alain Delon

Izabela Czartoryska, Polish princess and patriot

The illusory search for a lost civilisation

John Lavery’s lasting impressions

Alex Salmond, the nearly man who almost broke up Britain

The curious history of imaginary libraries

A monarch’s message of unity

The language of flowers

The Edwardian assault on free trade

A little history of privacy

How to save imperial history

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The Ettrick Shepherd stands watch

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky – Rocket Man

The Indo-Pacific is an idea whose time has come

A contested Afghanistan could be even worse

Weimar on the West Coast

The beauty of brocade paper

George IV: a very decadent Prince

George Kennedy Young: Banker, Writer, Soldier, Spy

China’s neverending pigstory

Anna Komnene – the princess who chronicled Byzantium’s changing fortunes

The polymath in the age of specialisation

Nafissa Sid Cara — an ambiguous pioneer for Muslim women

The great beauty of Donatello

The strange death of the art school

Who are the modern Greeks?

Solitude standing

Genius has its limits

Milton vs the echo chamber

Angels among us

Order and chaos in ancient Indian thought

Will Russia be happy as China’s junior partner?

Helen Sutherland – brave cultivator of the beautiful

Bartolus of Saxoferrato — a legal legend between two ages

The ancient art of sycophancy

Carl Akeley – the contradictory life of a taxidermist and hunter turned wildlife photographer

Nature through the eyes of two Victorians: a birdwatcher and his big-game hunting brother

Finding the God in Godard

Hip to be Square

Great Books: the Winnetou series by Karl May

Belarus: the state built by the Second World War

What are leaders good for?

In defence of freedom in fiction

Seeing through Mussolini’s lies

Christmas warmth illuminates dark times

Napoleon: the revolutionary who made himself an emperor

Bengal Opium: a study in continuity

The metamorphosis of Volodymyr Zelensky

Is farming the root of civilisation?

Antonio Greppi — architect of enlightened absolutism

What Waco Means Now

William Gerhardie’s Russian Problem

NATO’s Baltic Dilemma

A Little History of Modern Russia

Religion v Science: Crossing the Great Divide

The Spying Game Will Find a Use for AI

The German key to European liberty

In search of Ararat

Venetian visions of China’s future

The multiple mysteries of Italian wine

Taking sport too seriously

The inexhaustible genius of classical music

Super superconductors? Don’t believe the hype

Democracy is no longer a ‘hurray-word’ in West Africa

The limits of the Roman Empire

Hegel’s philosophy of history

The limits of dictatorship

Polycrisis? What polycrisis?

Giacomo Puccini: untormented genius

‘We are in the most sustained period of high crisis since 1962’ — in conversation with Philip Zelikow

Auden’s Austrian summer

Did slavery cause the British Industrial Revolution?

Fake Shakespeare

7 October has not changed the Middle East

Inside Mozambique’s war on terror

The unmaking of Julius Caesar

The Pythagoras myth

Iran and Pakistan’s shared crisis in Baluchistan

Stravinsky’s forever modern masterpiece

Friedman fighter

All hail the mandarin collar

The many meanings of the age of upheaval

Sweden’s long and winding road to NATO

Russia’s long imperial moment

The salvation of Spinoza

China and Russia: forever brothers?

Henry Stubbe, early modern champion of ‘Mahometan Christianity’

How East Germany lost the battle for technology

The rise of the great power carve up

Iran’s sudden power vacuum

NATO’s next act

Charles Dickens’ creature comforts

Japan’s genius for crafts

The spires at the heart of French history

Putin’s Napoleon complex

The medieval roots of modern antisemitism

The Islamist rivalry reshaping Turkish politics

The struggle for Saudi Arabia’s buried past

Mint condition

How censorship conquered the world, again

Resurrecting Mahler

Everything short of war: Hizbollah’s strategy lies in ruins

The unforgettable Michael Gambon

Arnold Schönberg and the artist’s right to be awkward

Music like you’ve never heard it before

How the US origin myth triumphed over history

Liberté and Laïcité

Trump and Iran face off across a new Middle East

Liberalism’s lost saint

Ghospelling and ghossiping

The 1840 Oriental Crisis, a triumph of diplomacy

Russia’s long war with the maritime powers

The spectacular disasters of Augustus the Strong

The hunchback of Mosul

Music at the end of time

Israel’s elusive peace

The making of Oscar Wilde

Securonomics belongs to the world of yesterday

The wages of a nuclear war

Virginia Cowles, a woman in search of trouble

The ballad of John and Paul

How the Young Turks became tyrants

Trump’s tariff paradox

The political power of knowing your enemy

Trump’s Syrian deal like no other

Poetry for the common reader

Crowded out

That was once upon a time in Iraq

Great Books: E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops

The perils of the quest for immortality

Sophie Scholl — still the White Rose blooms

Her Great Quality

Jaan Kross — a writer’s route to happiness

More than the sum of our parts

Did America lose the right stuff?

Infernal allies

The tragedy of the Trump circus

Element of the absurd — In Search of Romania by Dennis Deletant review

Worldview — Leadership in war

What was it like being Rome’s richest man?

Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto-gold turned to dust

Great Books: Colette’s The Pure and the Impure

How early EVs were overtaken by macho petrol heads

Great Books: Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk

The Gospel according to King Charles

Victor Frankenstein’s bad habits

The deep historical roots of Russia’s scorched earth policy

Machiavelli’s take on mercenaries

Sex and death in mid-nineteenth century America

What Richard Wagner can tell us about the Wagner Group

John Paul II understood geopolitics

A Chinese history to start a fire

The haunting presence of Stanley Kubrick

The British Empire’s Indian odyssey

Hollywood’s most gifted scribe

On Hilary Mantel and not meeting famous authors

How to reform the House of Lords without really trying

Why on earth do actors become novelists?

Diplomacy, betrayal and the road to Vietnam

On the frontline in Lebanon

The Mughals, opulence unparalleled

The perils of predicting the future

Donald Trump’s cryptopia

The heroes of Notre-Dame’s resurrection

Rahab, the Old Testament’s female super spy

A great power carve up

Mining for meaning

The quest for the age of the earth

What the West can learn from Cold War dissidents

The Second World War had its poets too

Why utopias still matter

Finding the future in France Profonde

Donnez moi un break

The quest for Vino and Veritas

Casting a vote for democracy

Bad history — why the Treaty of Versailles is an imperfect guide to future Russia-West relations

Working From Anywhere — the holiday never stops

In search of civilisation

The ancient roots of the modern holy war

Italia 1990s: footballing glory turned to dust

It came from outer space

Guittone d’Arezzo – Dante’s forgotten muse

Knowing Russia was going to invade Ukraine was not enough

Why 16 billion cortical neurons are not enough

Epicharis — defiance unbounded

Football’s most perfect meritocracy

Russia and the West – the path not taken

The different ways to know the gods in Ancient Greece

Does evolution have a moral or spiritual dimension?

Roman geopolitics — an exercise in myth-making

The transformation of Mitteleuropa

Grey matters

The lost allure of alchemy

On the art of metallurgy

Policy shaped by personal conviction — False Prophets: British leaders’ fateful fascination with the Middle East from Suez to Syria by Nigel Ashton review

The joy of books

Priaulx Rainier: Fearless and pioneering composer

The shadow of 1912: history points to a GOP split

Missing the boat in a broad canvas — Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern by Mary Beard review

Ancient scandals and power struggles: Succession’s unexpected playfulness with ancient history

Suffering — the price of being alive: an Islamic perspective

Dispatched to Donbas to honour frontline heroes

A collision of rival visions — Empire and Jihad: The Anglo-Arab Wars of 1870-1920 by Neil Faulkner review

Where Cambridge leads Britain should follow

The promise of Greenland

Waugh’s war

Maria Antonia of Bavaria — Electress of many talents

On betrayal

Pittacus – the good tyrant

The merrie histories of R.J. Unstead

Fighting the good fight

Edward Daniel Clarke – collector of the world

The ghost of Olof Palme: how support for the Kurds is complicating Sweden’s NATO accession

Moina Mathers — High Priestess of the Belle Époque

How to speak when speech isn’t free

Apology for a woman writing

This woman’s work

Dunwich’s very English apocalypse

The original women in STEM

Mimi Baez Fariña – life beyond the 60s

The many meanings of Georgia O’Keeffe

EI Weekly Listen — Fairy Tales of Statehood: the politics of sacred land and divine-kings by Jessica Frazier

Hans Rott — a symphonic stepping stone

Essaying a genre

The Eurasian Century, Part II: The Great Black Tornado

Star Wars — the mythos of our times

Nijinsky’s last dance

Great Books: Charles Dickens’ Hard Times

Is energy the god of progress?

Putin’s war with the Church

Jacobus Clemens non Papa – absolutely not the Pope

More than a bandstand

Fear and loathing in East Anglia

The possibility of elsewhere

Missing the theatre of everyday life

In praise of Rembrandt’s ruffs

The rise of the metaverse

Football’s rhetoric of suffering

The 1920 Battle for Ukraine — a warning from the past

A hook to uncover hidden histories — My Grandfather’s Knife: And Other Stories of War and Belongings by Joseph Pearson review

Frederic Prokosch — freedom in fiction

China’s ruling creed at 100: the Party never stops

The silence of Chinese intellectuals under Xi Jinping

Women in modern China — the odds are heaped against Peng Shuai

Margaret of Austria, Duchess of Savoy – true to her own self

Gareth Evans — philosophy’s lost prodigy

A marriage of the geopolitical, the military and the material — Victory at Sea: Naval Power and the Transformation of the Global Order in World War II by Paul Kennedy review

In praise of music’s uselessness

Patrick Hamilton’s reversals of fortune

Bohumil Hrabal — king of palaverers

Kerouac Abroad, Kerouac at Sea and Kerouac Out There

Mikhail Gorbachev gave Russia a chance

Madame de Pompadour — eighteenth-century fashion and twenty-first-century fads

The Pacific Century is here — but not as advertised

Stalin, Mao and turbulent transitions in authoritarian regimes

How the information age really began

Gorbachev did not end the Cold War alone — the West won

Have Britons lost the art of talking proper?

Great Books: The Sorrows of Satan by Marie Corelli

Democratised and declassified: the era of social media war is here

Superforecasting will not save us

A very medieval cost of living crisis

The imbalance of terror: reflections on nuclear deterrence from the 1980s

When the fighting stops, what then?

Winston Churchill, arch-pragmatist

Sharing Everest a tall order

Hiring – new opportunities at Engelsberg Ideas

Where does Cuba’s destiny lie?

Kon Satoshi — animator of unmatched talent

Who created The Paintings for the Temple?

Capitalism’s Dutch dynamic

José Saramago was the master of reinvention

Great Books: Virginia Woolf’s Flush: A Biography

NATO is back

Pulling at the threads of astrology

Great Books: Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie

Liberty and the myth of Venice

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca – conquistador brawler turned defender of Indigenous American Rights

US aiding Ukraine won’t deter China

Great Books: Alistair Horne’s The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916

The West’s Lust for Liberty

Spring’s Norman Roots

Sparta’s Self-inflicted Wound

Estonia’s Musical Miracles

Liberty in the Shadow of Bonaparte

Highs and lows

Noel Coward’s too brief encounter with the silver screen

The many paradoxes of Bernard Mandeville

Marching on Rome

The Ancients loved dogs too

In search of William Byrd’s lighter side

Milan Kundera dreamt in Czech

Ukraine’s long game

You can call me Al

Strawberry buns at The End of the World Café: thoughts on the Polish-Russian border

Beyond Berlin

The invention of the average

The first prime minister

Ransacking Naples

The many worlds of Margaret Cavendish

Finding Turkey in Narnia

An earthy, austere Ring

The boundless creativity of Wayne Shorter

A day to remember

The sorrow and pity of war

Gaza’s troubles began long ago

Hamas’ genocidal massacre on October 7 has deep historical roots

Israel’s Fauda fallacy

Iranians know who their enemy is, and it’s not Israel

Celebrating Ligeti’s soundspace odyssey

Celebrating Anpanman at fifty

The many meanings of Jihad

The Messianic roots of the modern settler movement

Powell and Pressburger worked miracles

Ferdinand’s second life was the sweetest

Is Falstaff too large a character to bring to life?

The broken lawnmower: Noël Coward’s greatest line?

Krampus lives

Fay Schopen, 1975-2023

Gaza and the long tail of terror

Medieval wanderlust

The dialects of Joseph Wright

Going it alone

Navalny’s end

The most dangerous of short stories

Nixon’s dance with the chairman

Worldview — Ukraine, two years on

Sargent’s brush with fashion

Curt Bloch’s underwater resistance

Russia and the West: a dialogue of the deaf

Kind of Blue’s quiet mystery

An Easter elegy

The forgotten art of memory

A wild Winterreise

A dynasty of human frailty

Michael Tanner, the complete critic

Rethinking Impressionism

Isabella Whitney, England’s first female professional writer

The secret to Byzantium’s success

The bells, the bells

The Warsaw Pact’s forgotten legacy

Venice, the serenely unclassifiable city

James Salter, last of the Americans

James Ensor, the man behind the masks

Nietzsche’s Italian connection

Eric Rohmer’s timeless antidotes

Queen Isabella, the ‘she-wolf of France’

Abraham Lincoln’s warning against mob rule

Russia returns to Svalbard

Poetry, prose and the battle for Paradise Lost

Two assassinations and a region on the brink

Hydro-imperialism

The hidden fractures beneath America’s Cold War triumph

The muddles and mysteries of A Passage to India

Americana noir

How Arthur Ashe rewrote the script

What makes a good opening line?

The invention of music

A little history of the anchovy

Ancient India’s global reach

Old tech makes new problems for Hizbollah

Glasgow’s theatre of enchantment and heartbreak

The revelation of Joachim du Bellay

Why human creativity matters in the age of AI

Dr Strangelove’s comedy of nightmares

The many makings of Donald Trump

Xi and his presidents

Five obstacles to Trump’s peace plan

Nasser’s children

The magic of Tirzah Garwood

An echo of South Korea’s past

The rift that doomed the Confederacy

Uplifting India

The long struggle for Syria

The pardon paradox

Russia’s Cold War Redux strategy for the Middle East lies in ruins

A deep history of games

Literacy’s declining empire

Podcasts v the written word

Maria Callas made her own myths

The lost art of chorography

Trump in the shadow of Reagan

Why Indonesia joined the BRICS

Geopolitics, the Scandinavian way

The deep history behind America’s Greenland gambit

Russia cannot conquer Ukraine

The betrayal of Ukraine

Nothing is worse than an inconclusive peace

Partygoing at the opera

The art of Éric Rohmer

My journey to a defiant Ukraine

Bringing back the stately quadrille

The pen that became a symbol of France

The power of pilgrimage

An empire of ivory and inhumanity

Henry Fuseli knew about nightmares

How a Republic falls

Is this free speech?

Shostakovich spoke truth to power

A leisurely guide to a spiritual life

The art of the hedgerow

The historical power of Jan Matejko’s painting

Kashmir’s forgotten war goes global

Countryside writing’s rebirth

The times and tides of the wild River Thames

Ukraine’s deep strike

England’s time of troubles

Lillie Langtry and the business of beauty

The Islamic Republic on the ropes