Every empire produces at least one great historian who anatomises its exhaustion with a completeness that neither predecessors nor successors quite match. For Rome, it was Edward Gibbon who dissected ...

Eighty years on, the Nuremberg trials, for all its imperfections, remain the world’s most audacious attempt to tame barbarism with law.Courtroom 600 of the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg today has lon...

A young British correspondent sent to decode Mao’s China instead became one of the earliest symbols of hostage diplomacy.Anthony Grey, who passed away last month aged 87, first learned what it meant t...

One summer’s day in 2011, as I browsed through the cluttered shelves of Blossoms’ Bookstore in Bangalore, I stumbled upon a doorstopper of a book. The tome was David Bergamini’s Japan’s Imperial Conspiracy, a 1,400-page exposé that sought to do for the Pacific theatre what William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich did for Nazi Germany. As an obsessive World War II completist, I was astonished that I had never heard of this book.As I later discovered, the academic establishment’s effo

A 1077 diplomatic mission from the Chola Empire to the Song court raises questions about ancient maritime rivalries, trade and the blurred lines between empires.In the Songshi, the written history of ...

Xi Jinping’s secret manifesto against ‘Western values’ still shapes the Party’s battle to preserve its grip on power.In April 2013, the General Office of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) circulated a...

The murder of Hridaynath Ghosh seemed unsolvable until a brown smudge on a calendar and a classification system devised in Kolkata rewrote the rules of justice.It was August 15, 1897. Hridaynath Ghosh...

In the final part of this series, we trace the forgotten Cold War alliance between Iran, Israel, and the U.S. and their lasting political fallout.Israel and its Discontents - Part 3A forgotten Cold Wa...

William L. Shirer’s searing account of the Third Republic’s collapse remains the most readable narrative of France’s humiliation in 1940.It took just six weeks for German tanks to shatter French lines...

In the spring of 1848, two British naturalists, John Wolley and Alfred Newton, sailed to Iceland, propelled by equal measures of ambition and desperation. Their quarry was not just any creature but th...