History

‘The history of our love affair with violence’ is how Michael Newton describes his new book, Age of Assassins. In fact, its scope is much narrower: assassination in Europe and the US from the murder of Lincoln in 1865 to the attempt on Reagan’s life in 1981. So, no Gandhi, no Allende, none of the killings carried out in the name of militant Islam. Even some of the assassinations within the author’s time frame are not considered – Olof Palme’s, for example, or the murders in Italy’s anni piombi in the 1970s and ‘80s. Newton’s central argument is that in the period covered assassination became less about political causes and

The Roman orator Quintilian offered some practical advice to the budding politician: don’t move too languidly, flick your fingers, or tilt your neck in a feminine way if you want to master the art of rhetoric. Doing all or any of these things could make you seem unmanly. You might have been born a man, but masculinity was definitely something you had to work at. I dare say little has changed there, though perhaps any decision to bolster one’s masculinity today comes less from the kind of external pressures put upon men by society in antiquity, than personal reactions to what is deemed a societal norm (to wax or not

‘The Maidenhead’ Have you not in a chimney seen A sullen faggot wet and green, How coyly it receives the heat, And at both ends does fume and sweat? So fares it with the harmless maid When first upon her back she’s laid; But the well-experienced dame, Cracks and rejoices in the flame. Rochester is a favourite of A-level students because he writes about sex and uses rude words. That in itself would not make him an accomplished poet. Sex is not an obscure subject and there are lots of words which rhyme with ‘prick’. But there are good reasons to read Rochester. One is that he had a knack

The Jamaican High Commission in London held a party last night to launch a patois translation of the Gospels. The translation, published by the Bible Society, is the culmination of 20 years work by academics at the University of the West Indies and other institutions, studying the rules of the creole created by plantation slaves and committing them fully to paper for the first time. The project has been part-funded by donations from congregations whose primary (and often only) language is patois rather than English, the language in which scripture has always been written and read in the nominally English-speaking Caribbean. This is an important cultural moment. It is an

The question of how Europe stumbled into the horrific abyss of  the First World War, the catastrophe which The Economist once called ‘the greatest tragedy in human history’ is obviously of much more than purely academic interest. (Though it is chiefly academics who have been arguing about it ever since). As we approach the centenary of the conflict’s outbreak, one of them, Christopher Clark, Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University, has written a magnificently detailed study of the diplomatic dance that led the continent up to and over the edge. The Sleepwalkers should be required reading for politicians and decision-makers fumblingly steering the world in our own age, an epoch perhaps

Lawrence Norfolk has always liked to centre his novels around a mixture of existing and constructed myth, and then let the action which happens centuries later be informed by or feed back into this network. His first book in twelve years, John Saturnall’s Feast, explores how the Civil War affected the career of a 17th century chef, the kitchens of great country houses and the symbolism of food. Its mythic centre is a pagan rite belonging to a pre-Christian British people, in which serving and eating food was the basis of an egalitarian community. In Charles I’s reign the one person left alive with the key to this feast is

‘How the War Began’ by Thomas Jordan, 1663. ‘I’ll tell you how the war began: The holy ones assembled (For so they called their party then Whose consciences so trembled). They pulled the bishops from their seats, And set up every widgeon; The Scotch were sent for to do feats With oat-cakes and religion. They plucked communion-tables down, And broke our painted glasses; They threw our altars to the ground, And tumbled down the crosses; They set up Cromwell and his heir, The Lord and Lady Claypole; Because they hated Common Prayer, The organ and the maypole.’ Three-hundred and fifty years ago, in September 1662, congregations in churches all over

In a promotional video clip, Sebastian Faulks describes his new novel, A Possible Life, as like ‘a symphony in five movements… or an album in which the tracks are separate but the whole thing adds up to more than the sum of its parts.’ The idea of the musical novel – held together by themes, motifs and echoes rather than a linear plot – has been discussed or attempted by authors from Flaubert to Kundera. So what has Faulks, with his bestseller know-how, brought to this fragile form? We are given five separate stories with a large historical and geographical range. Their centres include Geoffrey Talbot, a prep-school languages master

Patrick Hennessey was a founder member of the Junior Officers’ Reading Club, formed when the Grenadier Guards toured Iraq in 2006. He is the author of The Junior Officers’ Reading Club — the story of how a ‘wise-arse Thatcherite kid’ became a thoughtful soldier. It is among the best examples of British military witness written since 1945. Hennessey, now a barrister, has recently penned a sequel of sorts, called Kandak: Fighting With Afghans. It is published by Penguin tomorrow. He has answered this week’s Shelf Life questionnaire.  1) What are you reading at the moment? I’m finally getting round to reading Life and Fate which is, so far, living up

For many of us the Battle of Midway is just one more Hollywood spectacular in, to paraphrase Neville Chamberlain, a far-away sea of which we know little. But having recently taken a closer look at the battle I am struck both by what was at stake and what the consequences of the American victory were for the Allies at the time and geopolitics since then. When the Japanese attacked the American fleet at Pearl Harbour on 7 December 1941 they sank four battleships, destroyed 188 aircraft and damaged 159 other planes. Because, by sheer chance, there were no American carriers at Pearl Harbour on that day, the Japanese failed in

‘Epitaph on the Earl of Strafford’ ‘Here lies wise and valiant dust, Huddled up ‘twixt fit and just: STRAFFORD, who was hurried hence ‘Twixt treason and convenience. He spent his time here in a mist; A Papist, yet a Calvinist. His prince’s nearest joy, and grief; He had, yet wanted all relief. The prop and ruin of the state; The people’s violent love, and hate: One in extremes loved and abhorred. Riddles lie here; or in a word, Here lies blood; and let it lie Speechless still, and never cry.’ If Nick Clegg lived in bloodier times he might have ended up like Strafford by now. Executed on the eve