The daughter of Russian immigrants in Leeds, Simpson made it her life's mission to help academic refugees. During WW2 alone, she saved 16 future Nobel Prize winners, 74 future Fellows of the... read more
In less than a month in 1870, the Prussian army invaded France, captured Napoleon III and changed the balance of world power. Its success had far-reaching effects...
A sequence of essays about the Treaty that addressed the new Turkish state and the Middle East. At Versailles, before the rise of Ataturk, the West thought such matters had less claim on the... read more
From the perspective of the people who have worked and lived there since 1862, when it was a fishing village, rather than of the imperial powers who controlled it.
How Stalin isolated and pampered Western journalists in the gilded cage of the Metropol Hotel in order to control their output: their translators were often paid to share their beds, but oth... read more
Following his outstanding book 1913: The Year Before the Storm, , Illies looks at the affairs of de Beauvoir, Sartre, Dietrich, Mann (both T & K), Nabokov and others, set against the looming... read more
Leadership and moral compromise in Occupied France, seen through the lens of P?tain's trial in 1945. Julian Jackson is superb on the French Occupation and his biography of de Gaulle was magi... read more