Roger Louis, Kerr Professor of English History and Culture at the University of Texas at Austin, former president of the American Historical Association, honorary CBE, editor-in-chief of the Oxford History of the British Empire, is one of those infuriating Americans who know more about our history than we do ourselves. In his fastness deep in
There is a delightful tradition among the English of writing guide books to inaccessible parts of the world. Nowhere has inspired us more than South and Central Asia, seat of the Raj and the theatre that staged the Great Game. Contrary to what one might suppose, it is not a tradition that died with the
One-to-one conflict injects adren- alin into sport. For a period, inevitably finite, a pair of rivals will elevate themselves above their contemporaries, and produce contests which will divide not only cognoscenti, but also the community at large, into two camps. This book is about one of the most magnetic of such contests for primacy waged
This, as its title suggests, is a poignant book. In his account of the world’s last great polio epidemic in Cork, to which he fell victim at the age of six, nearly 50 years ago, Patrick Cockburn is neither self-centred nor self-pitying. He shows journalistic detachment in discussing the history and character of this terrifying
For far too long, the history of 20th- century Russia has been understood almost exclusively through the prism of politics, as if it were about nothing more than Marxism and Leninism, revolution and totalitarianism, war and famine. But in fact the history of Russia over the past 100 years is not only one of multiple
