George IV: a very decadent Prince
Saul David
George IV was a dissolute dandy and sybarite – but he was also a brilliant patron of the arts.
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George IV was a dissolute dandy and sybarite – but he was also a brilliant patron of the arts.
The failure of the Austro-Hungarian order spelt the end of the most cosmopolitan culture in Europe’s history.
Samurai women in early Japan were cloistered, unseen figures – but it is a mistake to underestimate their importance.
The problem of what constitutes imperial power is an ancient one – how have empires behaved throughout history?
Without a vision or programme of a different society or future, the left has retreated to pluralism and the idiom of choice as its most radical idea.
Dying to defend territory is an ancient human need – but war in the 21st century may not follow the script.
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Once, illicit sex was believed to be the ultimate transgression and a danger to society. Since the Enlightenment, attitudes have grown more tolerant.
The history of man is a story of mimicry and copying rather than innovation and ‘light-bulb moments’.
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Napoleonic geopolitics didn’t make much impression on Europe’s maps, but its influence was wide-ranging.
Love has become widely seen as a democracy of salvation open to all.
Our information-rich civilisation is not superior or inferior to the pre-literate world of Brazil’s indigenous peoples, just different.
This period of turbulence could turn today’s twenty-somethings into the leaders of a new liberal revolution.
The elaborate infrastructure we have created in order to eat food before it rots is one of the great triumphs of modern civilisation.
The Greeks invented the notion of the interrelationship of geography and politics; indeed, they elaborated it in myriad ways.
It is not just politics that is beset by tribalism. The social sciences are also vulnerable to in-group bias.
Islam – unlike Christianity – may not have a central motif of pain, sin and suffering, but it reveals so much about what it means to live with adversity.
The story of the Cleveland Housing Renewal Project illustrates the tensions at the heart of capitalism – between growth and conservation, creation and decay.
Thomas Babington Macaulay, the laudator temporis acti of the high Victorian age, showed us there is more than one way to write history.
Oliver Twist shows us the young genius in the very act of mastering his craft, turning himself, by sheer willpower, into one of the world’s greatest writers.
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