The influenza pandemic behaved much like the conflict itself – picking out the young and fit before their time. Read by Leighton Pugh.
We need to focus on how we warn about threats and hazards. Data and forecasting can only get us so far – the critical factors are human instinct and courage.
Thucydides saw plague as an opportunity to improve the health of society. But history shows that pandemics have a way of disrupting medical and social progress. Read by Leighton Pugh.
The Covid-19 crisis has accentuated all the geopolitical fault lines of the past decade. Read by Leighton Pugh.
Thucydides saw plague as a disease of the ‘body politic’ – and an opportunity to improve the health of society. History shows that pandemics have a way of disrupting our assumptions about medical and social progress.
No event in human history has affected the entire world so quickly and comprehensively.
The influenza pandemic behaved much like the conflict itself – picking out the young and fit before their time.
The Covid-19 crisis has accentuated all the geopolitical fault lines of the past decade.
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.
Immigration, asylum and naturalisation policies have always been at the heart of great power competition. It is time for American policymakers to begin thinking about how a more enlightened approach to immigration can help the United States preserve its primacy.
Britain’s pre-eminent political historian and constitutional analyst chronicles the pandemic and lists the ingredients for a ‘new Beveridge’; but there are international parallels, too.
The current reaction against free trade is a result of a blind faith in the market, but retreat into economic isolation is not a solution either. The policies of George Canning, a nineteenth century British Foreign Secretary, can offer a useful lesson in the values of following the middle way.
The Western alliance has got serious about coordinating its dissemination of intelligence, but it needs to avoid its pitfalls.
As the old adage goes, Nepal is a yam between two boulders. However, slowly but surely Nepal is unsticking itself from its southern neighbour and turning north towards China.
Although previously dismissed as fanciful and tedious, the world of E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops in fact bears an unsettling resemblance to our own.
A goal for China which had recently seemed attainable is beginning once more to recede into the distance, argues Rush Doshi.
Science’s demons began with Descartes and still thrive in our age of reason – but these thought-experiments can enhance our understanding of the universe.
This comprehensive – and somewhat bleak – survey of modern warfare questions our assumptions of what war is and details how we can develop the awareness and resilience needed to survive this new reality.
There are clear pitfalls in writing the first draft of history but that doesn’t mean that historians should shy away from the challenges of doing so.
In many ways, Xi Jinping’s China is a state like no other. But its ambitions for global supremacy are but a new twist on a familiar problem – and are eliciting a familiar response from the rest of the world.
Fortresses, border walls and guard towers – today’s excessively guarded age is on a global scale far exceeding famous past efforts including that of Roman Emperor Hadrian and the Great Wall of China. Often unremarked on, these fascinating structures tell us a story of changing global power struggles and political might.
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