There are some places where history just grabs you by the jugular. This is one of them.

In the end, history, especially British history with its succession of thrilling illuminations, should be, as all her most accomplished narrators have promised, not just instruction but pleasure.

We seem wired to grieve with greenery. Allowing the dead to dissolve into the earth, to become part of the cycle of the seasons, has, for millennia, held the promise of cheating mortality.

DIY, cricket, automobile repair. I could study it for a lifetime and not produce a word on the carburettor.

Nations don't start out. There is not a particular moment when they unveil the essence of themselves. They are always a work in progress.

Charles was constitutionally incapable of being a constitutional monarch.

Histories never conclude; they just pause their prose. Their stories are, if they are truthful, untidy affairs, resistant to windings-up and sortings-out. They beat raggedly on into the future.