History

Agatha Christie’s spirit must be loving this poisonous new historical entertainment. Eleanor Herman has already enjoyed the success of Sex with Kings and Sex with the Queen, thoroughly researched, gossipy revelations of promiscuity among monarchs and their noble retainers during the Renaissance. She is an American author and broadcaster, born in Baltimore, now living in Virginia, but, at 58, she still concentrates her professional attention on the historic immorality and disastrous vulnerability of western European royalty. In the Middle Ages, when monarchs commanded virtually absolute power, rivalry for every top job was sufficiently intense to motivate assassination, and the least difficult way to commit it was with poison. As viewed

Awareness of German opposition to Hitler is usually limited to Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg’s attempt to blow up the wretched man on 20 July 1944. Hitler was at a briefing in his Wolf’s Lair, a secret forested redoubt, when Stauffenberg entered the room with his briefcase bomb (containing British plastic explosive), placing it beneath the table where Hitler was due to sit. Stauffenberg withdrew, pleading an urgent call, but the unsuspecting subordinate who took his place moved the briefcase further under the table and away from Hitler. Standing and smoking by his car, Stauffenberg — a one-armed, eye-patched veteran of the North African and Russian campaigns — watched as the

Among the myths of Ancient Greece the Cyclops has become forever famous, the Talos not so much. While both were monsters who hurled giant boulders at Mediterranean shipping, the Cyclops, who attacked Odysseus on his way home from Troy was a monster like us, the son of a god, an eater, a drinker, a sub-human with feelings. The Talos was more alien, by some accounts a mere machine, manufactured in metal by a god and pre-programmed only to sink ships and roast invaders alive, a cross between a Cruise missile launcher and an automatic oven. Talos began its existence just as early as the Cyclops. But it was only described

Who says that the ‘great man’ theory of history is dead? Following hard on the heels of Andrew Roberts’s magnificent biography of Churchill comes this equally well-written life of another superman who bestrode his era and all Europe like a colossus. Although Adam Zamoyski is at pains to insist that his subject was an ordinary mortal like any other, the simple facts of Bonaparte’s career somewhat belie any attempt to cut the little fellow down to size. How could this second surviving son of an impoverished minor nobleman from an obscure island come, within a few years, to dominate the entire continent, dictate terms to emperors, kings and popes, and

The 50th anniversary of the Vietnam war has produced an outpouring of books, along with Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s 18-hour television spectacular, which sparked in the United States yet another round of heated debate on the war. The journalist and military historian Max Hastings’s fast-paced and often compelling narrative will surely rank as one of the best products of this half-century reappraisal. Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy is a monumental undertaking. Many books analyse major Vietnam war policy decisions. Others discuss military operations; still others recount personal experiences. Hastings does all three in a single volume, although he gives greatest attention to the on-the-ground activities of North and South Vietnamese,

I bet that you are at best dimly aware of the Progress Trust, and that is what the members of this now-defunct fixture would have wanted. It was a misleadingly named group of comfortably off, often landed backbench Tory MPs, and its weekly discussions very rarely leaked. An unnamed member once explained why. ‘We have no shits,’ he said. The Trust, which would number Alec Douglas-Home and David Cameron, briefly, among its members, was secretive from the outset. It was established in 1943 to resume a more partisan style of politics, at a time when both main parties were still in theory committed to a ceasefire that the Conservatives felt

John Law was by any standards a quite remarkable man. At the apogee of his power in 1720, he was the richest private citizen in Europe and controller-general of finance in France, responsible not merely for the country’s income and expenditure but for its commerce, navigation, agriculture and industry. He created and presided over one of the earliest and greatest of all stock market boom-and-busts, that of the ‘Mississippi Company’, and inspired another, the South Sea Bubble. And he pioneered ideas about banking, monetary policy and financial markets that were revolutionary in his own time, and retain their importance three centuries later. Yet Law was not French, not a noble,

John Lilburne was only 43 when he died in 1657, an early death even for the time. But in many ways it was remarkable that he lived so long. He not only dodged Royalist bullets when fighting for Parliament in the civil war as Lieutenant Colonel Lilburne, but managed to avoid the noose or firing squad on three occasions, each time trusting his own principled legal dexterity (and a slice of luck that he would have seen as the hand of Providence) to cheat his would-be executioners. This was an age, of course, when men of far more elevated status than this member of the minor gentry from the north