Coming back late from the Hyacinth garden
Image source: Böcklin: In der Gartenlaube, ~1891, By Arnold Böcklin – “Von Anker bis Zünd, Die…
A list of 21 books that shaped me
This list may never end, or so the green dream of the solitary reader goes: 1….
Quotes to write by 1.
From Niccolo Machiavelli’s letter to the magnificent Lorenzo de Medici in presenting his The Prince: Nor…
Madness & History
I am reading Andrew Scull’s Madness in Civilization: a cultural history of insanity from the Bible…
Time may change me but I can’t change time
Roger Scruton writes, in How to be a Conservative: Whatever our religion and our private convictions,…
Inga Clendinnen, Dancing with Strangers
If I were to teach a course on the history of Australians in the global nineteenth…
The enigmas of Ivan the Terrible
Ivan the Terrible tests the limits of historical understanding. All that we know of him we…
Third Rome
First there was the Latin empire, polyglot and legal, centred on Rome. Then there was the…
Thoughts on coasts
We think about history in categories that are the imprints of how generations of tradition have…
The return of the venal office and tax-farmer
The French Revolution was in part a revolt against a degraded court, whose profligacy in prestige…