Why we make lists
Alastair Benn
The Covid-19 pandemic has led to endless list-making and tally-counting. History shows us that this is a fundamental human need.
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The Covid-19 pandemic has led to endless list-making and tally-counting. History shows us that this is a fundamental human need.
Mattias Hessérus is in conversation with Fredrik Logevall – author of the new, landmark work on the making of JFK.
Blindness offers a metaphor for the perils of worldly delusion. And the physically blind can sometimes discover new ways of seeing.
Iain Martin with guests Adrian Wooldridge and Vernon Bogdanor discusses the Covid crisis and the long-term impact that it might have on the development of the West.
Cricket was one of the few sports that was played near-normally this summer – its modern form is a welcome emblem of global connection.
In this episode of History Lessons, Mattias Hessérus is joined by Alexander Lee to discuss Machiavelli’s life and works. Was he always an adept politician? And was he as immoral as is often claimed?
In this episode of History Lessons, Mattias Hesserus and Jessica Frazier are in conversation about the differences between Eastern and Western philosophies of crisis. Is the desire for a return to ’normal’ inherently western? What can we learn from narratives of rebirth? And, was the global lockdown a mass-participation yogic experiment?
The folkloric atmosphere suggested by a title like Once Upon a Time in Iraq a landmark documentary on the long catastrophe of Saddam’s atrocities, the US-led
How did the West land in, what we might politely call, a ‘sub-optimal’ position? And is a revival of the West feasible? To discuss these questions Iain Martin is joined by Peter Frankopan and David Frum.
On this episode of History Lessons, Mattias Hessérus is joined by the historian and author Andrew Roberts to look through the careers of great figures like Napoleon Bonaparte, Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher (as well as some of history’s great villains, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin) and see how they handled the pressure of a crisis.
In my childhood home in Edinburgh, I remember a portrait hanging in the dining room of a dour looking man swathed in a tartan plaid
If, as Tom Holland wrote last week for Engelsberg Ideas, the spectre of the empty metropolis haunts civilisation, then our empty cities are also haunted
On this episode of History Lessons, Mattias Hessérus speaks to the maritime historian Lincoln Paine, author of The Sea and Civilization, about the history of quarantine, how pandemics have affected trade and travel in the past, and whether globalisation can survive the current moment.
The mantra ‘following the science’ has become a commonplace of the coronavirus vocabulary. And indeed, social distancing represents a virtually unparalleled opportunity for scientists to
On this, the first episode of History Lessons, Mattias Hessérus speaks to the historian Tom Holland about the relationship between reality and art in the age of a pandemic.
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