Preaching​ before Edward VI and his council in June 1548, Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester, reflected that ‘in my time hath come many alterations.’ Gardiner was referring to the break with Rome, the dissolution of the monasteries and the iconoclastic fervour of Edward’s reign, each of which represented a ‘great alteration’ of policy and sentiment.

In his 2002 memoir Interesting Times, the British historian Eric Hobsbawm offers a succinct definition of the 1900s. “Nothing is more characteristic of that century,” he notes, “than what my friend Antonio Polito calls ‘one of the great demons of the 20th century: political passion’.”

The subtitle of Walter Reid’s biography of James Ramsay MacDonald refers to ‘the extraordinary rise and tragic fall’ of Labour’s first prime minister. The rise was not especially extraordinary. In the first decades of the 20th century several people from relatively humble backgrounds – David Lloyd George and John Burns from outside MacDonald’s party, and Philip Snowden and Arthur Henderson (to give just two examples) from within it – reached the top or very near the top of British politics.

As Russia’s war against Ukraine enters its fifth year, the economy that sustains it has been transformed in ways that will be difficult—perhaps impossible—to reverse without another crisis.

Around 3.30pm on 30 April 1945, Adolf Hitler shot himself in his Berlin bunker. Minutes later, his still warm body was carried outside by loyal staffers and burned in the Reich Chancellery gardens. His physical exit from this world was swift, yet in cultural terms the Nazi dictator has taken an extraordinarily long time to die.

I was once introduced at the Edinburgh book festival by a man holding his nose, intoning a string of notes and wriggling his fingers around. He was a journalist and critic, a sophisticated and knowledgeable writer and a Scot. What was he doing?

Lithuania was the last major pagan principality in Europe, worshipping its own array of gods until Grand Duke Jogaila converted to Roman Catholicism in 1386 to marry a twelve-year-old Polish princess and become king of Poland.

Professor Appiah, the author of this erudite book, gave the Reith Lectures in 2016: “discussing ways in which people’s thinking about religion, nation, race and culture often reflects misunderstandings about identity” (BBC depiction).

In the early 1960s, India faced the prospect of famine after a series of monsoon failures. In 1968, its government launched its Green Revolution, led by an agricultural scientist, to promote high-yielding hybrid varieties of wheat and rice grown with large infusions of water and chemical fertilizers

Words are poor mountaineers and poor miners”, lamented the young Franz Kafka. “They cannot bring down the treasure from the mountains’ peaks or up from the mountains’ depths.” The failure of language to live up to these – strikingly manly – standards was driven home in this case by their being inscribed in the commonplace book of a teenage girl (Selma Kohn, whom Kafka was attempting to woo).