I promised myself that the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference would be my last encounter with the organised far right for a while. Then I remembered that one of Britain’s oldest far-right religious organisations meets only a few yards from my house. For years the British-Israel World Federation held meetings in Durham. Today it meets … Read more
On 4 July 1776 the United States declared its independence from the greatest empire on earth. For 250 years Americans have celebrated that act of rebellion. The United States likes to think of itself as the country that threw off colonial rule, rejected empire and built something entirely new. The latest anniversary falls during the … Read more
One of the daftest things I read on line is the assertion that “you can’t rewrite history” This, of course, is nonsense, history is rewritten all the time, that is how history works. Each generation writes it’s own history, attitudes change, new facts emerge, documents are found in the archives, things are dug up from … Read more
Why People Get History So Wrong “History is the biography of great men,” once said a very famous idiot. It’s a terrible way to understand the past — academically, intellectually, and frankly, morally — and yet people still believe it. Loudly. You can see it in the endless culture war skirmishes over symbols. The recent … Read more
Yesterdays blog was all about the real and the fake, fact and fiction: I thought it would be fun to follow it up with a quiz. I have a minor obsession with knowing stuff, and being able to organise it in my head, mostly in chronological order. I am not sure if this is just … Read more
