Jonathan Sumption

France discovered the Arab world with Napoleon’s ill-fated expedition to Egypt in 1798. If David Pryce-Jones is to be believed, this event marked the beginning of two centuries of pernicious Arabophilia and anti-Semitism, leading successive French governments to support unpleasant Middle Eastern despots and turn a blind eye to Islamic terrorism. Like most large generalisations,

On the opening page of The Waning of the Middle Ages, Johan Huizinga remarked that ‘we, at the present day, can hardly understand the keenness with which a fur coat, a good fire on the hearth, a soft bed, a glass of wine were formerly enjoyed’. Well, C. M. Woolgar can. Not that he is

Bob Woodward is famous for persuading people to be indiscreet. This book comprises the collected indiscretions of a large number of people who have been at the heart of American policy-making about Iraq over the past five years. We can guess who some of them are. But we do not know, because most of them

In the great prize-giving of history, there are only two truly ‘bad’ kings of England: King John and James II. Or three if you count Ethelred the Unready. There is more argument about the ‘good’ ones, but King John’s brother Richard ranks high in most people’s pantheon, right up there with King Arthur and Queen

We are still living with the images and legends of the crusades. Were they, as the 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote, ‘the most signal and durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation’? Were they, as muscular Christians and imperialists suggested in the 19th century, a matchless epic

Should the state take action against people who have done nothing wrong, if there are plausible grounds for thinking that they are about to? Suppose, says Alan Dershowitz, that reliable intelligence shows that a large-scale terrorist attack is about to happen. Should the law allow the police to round up whole categories of potential perpetrators

Karen Armstrong likes to take on large subjects, and they don’t come much larger than this. Her latest book is nothing less than an attempt to describe the historical origins of all the great world religions. The nearest analogy is The Key to All Mythologies, the grandiloquently named tome which George Eliot’s Mr Casaubon never

We know very little about the ‘good’ kings of medieval England. Weakness makes better copy. Gossip and laughter leave more traces than dumb admiration. Contemporaries, fascinated and appalled by their complex and unstable personalities, have left us vivid accounts of Edward II and Richard II, whose reigns both ended in deposition and murder. By comparison,

Henry VIII is one of the most difficult and controversial figures in English history. The Victorian scholars who were the first to apply themselves seriously to his reign, regarded him as a lecherous despot. The king’s role in the foundation of the Church of England was either the providential by-product of his lust for Anne

Dwelling Place is the story of a planter family in 19th-century Georgia, and of the slave community which served it. As an insight into the moral dilemmas of a slave-owning society and the local patriotism which sustained the Confederate side in the American civil war, it is one of the more remarkable recent books on

The French rarely read books by foreigners about their history. This is a pity, for their own historians have not always done the job well. The ideological fault-lines of French intellectual life have obstructed understanding of France’s 20th century. A francocentric view of the world has added to the problem. So, until recently, has the

It was the second world war Allies, according to John Dunn, who converted ‘democracy’ into a slogan. Their object was innocent enough. They wanted to identify themselves by a word which signified everything that the Axis powers were not. Yet a word that could embrace both Stalin’s Russia and Roosevelt’s United States must have seemed

It seems only yesterday that Margaret Thatcher was ranting away before an invited group of academics, journalists and experts at Chequers about the perils of German unification and the imminent subordination of all Europe to a nation of 80 million beasts, barbarians and bullies. The idea seemed distinctly odd even at the time, but not

This book stands in an ancient intellectual tradition. Its theme dates back to the year 1798, in which the English economist Thomas Malthus published his famous theory of demography. Human population, Malthus reasoned, grows exponentially, as each extra couple multiplies itself in turn; whereas food production can increase only arithmetically, and beyond a point not

The crusades have had a bad press lately, for reasons which are not far to seek. They were characterised by the three things that the modern age has found most abhorrent about its own recent past: religious enthusiasm, racism and colonial settlement. More generally, they were inspired by a belief that there is a divine

William Pitt the Younger always was the politician’s politician: an MP at 21, prime minister at 24 and dead at 46, with only two years out of office in between. Pitt dominated British politics for his entire adult life. He lived for the House of Commons and for the daily grind of government service. He

Timothy Garton Ash has become a bishop. In Free World, he has written something which is less a work of political analysis than an extended sermon about the value of political liberty and international co-operation between Western states. Of course, no one is against these admirable things, but they sometimes come at too high a

Stanley Milgram was an academic psychologist at Yale who achieved a brief moment of fame in the early 1960s as the creator of ‘obedience experiments’. The idea was to discover how far people will act against their own most basic instincts if they are following someone else’s orders. A large sample of ordinary and superficially

To become a famous philosopher, as the French have discovered, you need an all-embracing theory. It does not have to be right, or even particularly well thought out, provided that it is interesting and admits of no exceptions. Michael Oakeshott, who died in 1990, was an academic political philosopher who passed much of his life

The First Crusade is one of the great historical adventures. Whatever one may think of the consequences or the moral issues, the migration of perhaps 100,000 people across Europe and Asia Minor, and the conquest of a large part of the Middle East by the 20,000 or 30,000 survivors, all over the space of three