Teresa Bejan’s history of equality before egalitarianism locates the origins of a modern conviction in the England of the 1640s. It is an exceptional work that marks a new beginning.

When my partner and I set off to leave, announcing that, despite staying near Opéra, where some violent scenes were occurring, we would return home by metro and on foot, not by taxi, the guests looked ...

The Fifth Republic’s deteriorating fiscal situation offers the strongest parallel with the waning years of the Ancien Régime.

James Marriott's polemic 'The New Dark Ages' mourns the passing of the print age. But it oversells the triumphs of mass literacy, and says too little about the costs. A detail from an illustration by ...

Antonin Baudry's imaginative adaptation of my biography of de Gaulle, ‘A Certain Idea of France’, raises questions about which liberties film-makers may take when depicting the past. Scene showing ...

The American journalist's account of the Hiroshima bombing and its aftermath, told through the eyes of Japanese survivors, forced the world to reckon with the terrifying power of nuclear weapons. John ...

British commanders are still trained to prize the flash of intuitive brilliance. In an age of AI and autonomous systems, that instinct may prove actively regressive. General Montgomery watches his ...

Two hundred and fifty years after the first volume of the Decline and Fall, Edward Gibbon's diagnosis of why Rome collapsed is a warning to our own age. The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole. Credit: ...

In his drive to compete with China, President Trump has used bilateral trade deals to pursue geopolitical goals, accelerating the World Trade Organization's slide into irrelevance. Trump gold card ...

In the 16th century, Sweden’s rulers forged a fiscal-military state capable of projecting power across the Baltic Sea, launching a quest for empire that combined national glory with dynastic ...

With Ukraine adapting faster than its invader, several early indicators suggest that the war's trajectory is shifting in Kyiv's favour. Ukrainian servicemen of the aerial reconnaissance unit in ...

Economic warfare works slowly, gradually imposing ever higher costs on the enemy. But there is no single trick that causes an adversary's war effort to falter. 1806 satirical cartoon by James Gillray ...