List of posts

A casual affair
Anxiety
Funeral march
The War Game 3
A place in the sun
~~~
The Yellow Peril
Welshmen and Bretons
Historical sentiment
Tusa’s 1989
The War Game 2
The War Game
The BLDGBLOG Book
Owning water
Home
A noble paire
1989
Botha and Smuts
Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?
Thames
Noel Mewton-Wood
Plotinus and Ali Hujwiri
Frank Lloyd Wright and other mysteries
Occupied cities
Myths
Wild apples
The magistrate’s hand
Geometry and ambition
Gods not wolves
An America of secrets
The raw data
An Oxford Elegy
Pax Mogulica and Pax Britannica
Olympic cities 1
Born in 1989
Hugh Lloyd-Jones
The Indian merchant
William Kamkwamba
Elegant Extracts
Curated Secrets
Alicia de Larrocha
The World at War
Rome, Constantinople and the sea 2
Rome, Constantinople and the sea 1
1,000th post
The Confessor’s confessor
The Staffordshire hoard
The last Ottoman
Cheating Malthus
Separation
Silvanus
~~~
In Kensington Gardens
Moving furniture
Specialisation
People Power
~~~
363
周朝 (Zhōu) 3 or 戰國時代 (The Warring States)
A Syrian student
Under the Persians
Churchill on Islam
Islam in India and the Balkans
From synoikismos to dissolution 2
Gibbon’s error
From synoikismos to dissolution
Saint Levatorius of Kovno
Russian assassinations
As tres Marias
The six wives of Henry VIII
The twelve men on the moon
A follower of Symmachus
Horace Walpole
The landgrab
Arabs in the Ottoman Empire 2
The Syriac society
A pose of empiricism
Parag Khanna’s Second World
49th parallel 2
Storm in the Outer Hebrides
The new scramble for Africa
Reith Lectures 4
Trois poèmes de Jean Cocteau
Recreation
Paysandú and Alfama
Indian princely states
Sea-horses over the Jura
Uyghur protests
Robert McNamara
M. Butterfly
The homoeopathic treatment of nationalism
Change
The skirts of Eternity
Jason and Antiochus
Of the Jews (A.D. 50)
Jason – יסון
Volney and Gibbon
Indian horse-sacrifice
Jackson and Britten
Origins
The “Nazi army”
Writers
A preposterous thrust of opportunity
Off-duty Spartans
Onitsha market literature
A shoal of sharks
Entering Palestine
Southern Nigeria
Moral equivalency
Nigeria and Sudan
Rain
Greek against Greek
Melancholy late Romans and pathetic Gauls
Potter on Murdoch
South Africa before the Portuguese
Gaue
The stuffy closet
Before the global system 2
Before the global system 1
Cape Town
Leo the Great
~~~
The silliness of George Bernard Shaw
Augustuli
The Alimenta Italiae
Barbarossa’s cave
Medieval fishermen
Mit brennender Sorge
Google design
Louis XVI’s final declaration
The nineteenth century
Arabesque
Sleep
Her Britannic Majesty’s Representative
Noli me tangere
Envoys from Alexandria
Spoilt children and whipping-boys
The camera as Suetonius
Hellenism and Islam
Europe and Asia
United Artists of Dionysus
Byzantium and Greece
The Babylonian world-picture
Aelius Aristeides
The lunatic asylum at Aversa
Fête sur l’eau
The end of the Austrian army
Manila – Acapulco
Greek from Ancient Times
TIME lapse
Music
An ice-cream seller in Basra
A Persian hiatus
The gardens of Hofuf
Sublimation
Maghrebian nihilism
Ukiyo-e
Kuniyoshi
World Digital Library
Pius XI
Amphictyonies
Refworld and UNHCR 2
Refworld and UNHCR
The yokel in the aeroplane
Minxin Pei
Robert Cornelius and Romantic hair
Handel
Boulevard du Temple
~~~
The Arabian Passion
~~~
4’ 33”
Rome to Cologne
Maurice Jarre
War and succession
London c 1949
A lost art
The stone and the carrion
Toynbee and the Outline
Lesser men
Silicon Valley
John Hope Franklin
A thronging, amazing Paris
Lloyd George in Versailles
~~~
Another day in Mussoorie
Ruskin, Our Enduring Bond
The Austrian eagle
The clipper route
Parliaments in 1923
The Iron Age
Four modern saints
Rootless parliaments
Mamluk and Mongol
Messina and Marsala
In Damascus 2
Lakshmi Narayan Mandir
Crystal and spore
Persian in India
French culture in Egypt
The professional man
The giraffe
Tolstoy and Tagore
The National manufactory
The dilemma of Agathias
~~~
Captivity and Schism
The Genoese in the east
Apotheosis
In Damascus
Oliver’s Advice
Lupercalia
On the Visé Road, 1914
Angel Island
~~~
Except the Lacedaimonians
Tabula Regionum Europæ
A macédoine
City lights
Sidonius to Talleyrand
A pillar of the emirate
Landquart-Davos
Shaping the Post-Crisis World
~~~
Davos 09
~~~
Tchaikovsky in Davos
Davos to 2006
Gaza, gender, Galileo
Outsourcing enjoyment
Menander the Guardsman
Inaugurations
Peace
Wealth
In a Township of Asia Minor
The six cataracts of the Nile
Alla marcia quasi andante
~~~
The Tyrrhenian pirate
And then there were three
Delhi and Moscow
English translations of the Qur’an
The beginning of the end
The return of nationalism
Toynbee’s travel books
Chinese pilgrims
The siege of Gaza
~~~
The Long Christmas Dinner
Rivers
Indian temples
Two cruising Conors
The five fishes of Balyqly
Taj redux
Princess Coocoola
The flowers of Africa
Theophilos Palaiologos
Bertrand Russell 2
~~~
Bertrand Russell
Singabloodypore
Arab anglophiles
A German composer in Naples 2
~~~
Chinese in Naples, September 19 1823
A German composer in Naples
Susa and Ctesiphon
The Araxes
Papa 1 and Papa 2
~~~
The other Taj – the Gateway and the Gate
Millets and capitulations
The Laws of the Military Houses
The amphibian
The prestige of the Imperial office in Japan
Rangaku
Social change under the Tokugawa Shogunate
Roman funerals
Arriving in Constantinople 2
British law and Sharia
Peace conferences
Campania
Petra and Palmyra
100 South Africans
The spaniel of Couthon
~~~
Intellectual property
The impress of that mighty race
The city president
Over Istanbul
Sebastião!
The Cossack Army of the Dniepr
The cataracts of the Dniepr
Kazaks
abcdespañol to Yayasan Dian Desa
Hagia Sophia
Arriving in Constantinople
Hittistes and clandestins
The shadow of the West
Greek prisons at Smyrna
Byzantium 330-1453
Spain and Macedon
The Mahayana’s Royal Road
The King’s Highway
1950
The sport of militarism
Why the gods punish the rich
Ahmadinejad on CNN
The seven hills of Rome
Historical novels: Peter Vansittart
Two fronts
Pataliputra – Patna
Why the Tibetan glaciers matter
Collective egocentricity
Rosso pompeiano
Getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan
The wych-elm
~~~
A book to commission
A vein of ruthlessness
Slingsby Moor
Nero’s Deadline
Stalin’s cartoonist
Bread and Circuses returns
Random posts
~~~
In the Harbour-Town
Cities in a recesssion
Berlin and Busan
Islamabad and Doxiadis
~~~
German Wikipedia
Scotland – Ulster – Appalachia
The headmistress from Changsha
Not ready to cede a century
Love is God
~~~
The propagandist
The argument
The abridgements
The Study and after
~~~
Armistice Day and VE Day
Death in Hungary
Gaza gets a museum
Buddhism and Christianity
Criticism of Toynbee
Religio historici 3
Moscow in 1908
The Baltic coachman
On sale at Nice airport today
What Hadrian can teach Obama
Europe seen from Germany
Ten ghost towns
Strange events in ancient theatres
The Papacy in the sixteenth century
Naught for your comfort
Nicholas Breakspear and Laudabiliter
Knights-errant
Hugh Trevor-Roper on Walter Scott
Crippled by the scale of his task
Malcolm X
Babylon in Berlin
Tangents from my reading
The last year of the Horse Age
Versailles 1919
Toynbee and Young Indiana Jones
Omer Almagboul
British industry
Selective sentimentality
Historical novels: New Zealand
Lafayette to Metternich
The shot heard round the world 2
The Declaration of Independence 2
The Declaration of Independence 1
The shot heard round the world 1
Small fishing villages
The Arghandab
Men of Afghanistan
Alexandrias
The Old World’s eastern roundabout
Reith Lectures 3
Virtus Exercitus Romanorum
Transoxiana and Bactria
Afghanistan: A Companion and Guide
Afghanistan 2
Michael Wood’s India
Afghanistan
Flying past Sodom
The weasel’s tooth
Weak but infallible
The God Abandons Antony
A satirist
Goodbye to Muscat
Henry Chadwick
Quot homines, tot sententiae
A ghost story by Cavafy
Hong Kong
Old East Asia: films of Michael Rogge
Bist du ein Berliner?
Latin in Hungary 2
In a Large Greek Colony, 200 BC
Loving your city
Dying daily
L’italiano in Turchia
The Lure of the East
The Far East and the West
Reith Lectures 2
Historical novels: Norway
Historical novels: Greenland
Historical novels: Hungary
Eh bien, mon prince
The Aksum obelisk
The WEF “on” the Middle East
La nursery
Direct and indirect British rule in India
A Russian on Rome
Clean
Insulting Islam
Yves Saint-Laurent, and Attalisme
The Eurasian steppe
Being human
Odysseus’s Secret
Ethnologue
Uncontacted peoples
A Prince from Western Libya
Antony’s Ending
Going home from Greece
Peerages, baronetages, knightages
Groundnut days
Reith Lectures 1
Treasures from Afghanistan
Nabobs and sahibs
The Schleswig-Holstein Question
Two peace settlements
Gardens of intelligence
WorldWide Telescope
Wildlife
Chinese in Britain
The Leica
The Japanese
Goethe’s Italian Journey
Hellenic holy ground
Irena Sendler
HARDtalk
49th parallel
Curiosity
Gallicus Tumultus
Palestine Remembered
Islam and slavery
Nakba 60
Borobudur
Asians
Canaletto and Tiepolo
Galuppi among the Cretan crags
Culture and the mother tongue
Last of the Dictionary Men
Piano transcriptions
Philipp von Boeselager
Hassan Dehqani-Tafti
On an Italian Shore
Prokudin-Gorskii 3
The Hapsburgs and the Ottomans
Summer in Damascus
Shame
The Aria Database
The hurdy gurdy
Malcolm X in Oxford
Advice to Hamas
A Dream Deferred
The Old Bailey continued
Négritude
Judith Todd on Zimbabwe
Untouchable
The Sikh gurus
Revolts against caste
Indic and Hindu
Bringing a washing machine to Ghassan
Iraq and Egypt
Lucius Verus’s moustache
Bengalis reunited
~~~
Roman traffic
Sleepless in Rome
Holy cities
Bamiyan to Bumbusi
The online Hobson-Jobson
Religio historici 2
Dover Beach
Religio historici
~~~
Fraternisation
~~~
Good Friday
A more perfect union
China and Africa
Jerusalem 1971 and Ahad Ha’am
China-Tibet
Jerusalem 1968
Rav Kook
Rediscovering Cicero
The Ides of March
One
Assassination at Asculum
Nostalgia
Gaelic into English
1908
Westminster Quarters
Mahfouz in 2005
Kaisarion
The compassion of the Stoic
Figs in winter
Misericordia vicina est miseriae
In Alexandria, 31 BC
Assimilationists and Zionists
Gaza
From Muhammad Ali to Nasser
Uncovering Pakistan 2
Robin Yassin-Kassab
Like Mahmoud Darwish
Imad Mughniyeh
Lost opportunities of the Osmanlis
The moon and desolation
A very humane piece of rascality
Karachi sunsets
Uncovering Pakistan
Ancient Orissa
Sixty novels about Alexander
Historical whodunnits
The Economist, 1843-2003
Introduction
Longbows and clippers
Imperial obituaries
Colonialists
Armour and intolerance
Drawing
Domestications of animals
A wounded Greek apiarist
Namdaemun, Seoul
Perseverance
Calcutta 1969
The illusion of Norman Angell
Jewish and Christian Hellenophobia
Civil services 2: Umayyad, Manchu
Syria and Nubia
500th post
Civil services: 1, Achaemenian, Ottoman
Turkish headgear
Centrifugal history 2
Histories of Europe
Davos 1884
Ctesiphon and Constantinople
The Continent
Toynbee and Ikeda 3
~~~
Davos 08
Sunni and Shia
Ashura
Tien Shan to Himalaya
Justinian’s failure
Julian’s failure
Hessians in the British army
Divisions of the Roman Republic and Empire
Centrifugal history
Reconsiderations
Nepal and New Zealand
Disadvantages of a classical education
Abyssinia and Liberia
Tangier 1950 (and other places)
Eviction
A Turkish peasant
392-410
The dying world
A symbol of America
Forgetting Canada
Santa Cruz Island
Archaism in art
Carabas and the mob
Brigadiers and Benazirs
Marxist socialism: A page torn from a book
Relations between religions
The Chinese nurse revisited
Christmas 1961
~~~
The British way of denying atrocities
Hyderabad, Sindh
Enchanted London
Gould in conversation with Menuhin
Floor games
~~~
The artist as saint
The sense of history
Popes since 1789
Sound bath
Three 9/11 novels
Karlheinz Stockhausen
Yamoussoukro and Kamuzu
Child soldiers
The odium theologicum of our time
The temptations of Odysseus
Real Rossini
Real singing
Don Camillo and the Imam
Aden
Sudan
The Nineteenth Century and After
Islamic forbearance
China and Japan
China and India
The synthesizing mind
Paradox
Pasolini
Mishima
Thanksgiving
Christian submission
The Yangtze
Regius Professors of Modern History, from 1724
China’s sorrow
Globularity
~~~
Nineteenth-century group photographs
An ominous war
Yorick’s passport
Écrasez l’infâme
Requiem postscript
Requiems
~~~
Life and death masks
The feuilletons
World Requiem
Cleomenes’ self-mutilation
The Hiroshima bomber and Eve Curie
The mask off-stripped
Animateurs
Nationality and the War
~~~
In Cairo
A Turkish sequence
York
Taste
Facing old age
The Trojan Women
Voices
Trumpeter Landfrey
Florence Nightingale
Browning’s and Tennyson’s voices
Calls across the Wall
Robert Browning
Yugoslavia’s “negroes”
~~~
Zero Degree Turn – Iran and the Jews
The limits of the British Raj
New York
周朝 (Zhōu) 2
~~~
The Ring
Diehards
The two Eids
Eid-ul-Fitr 2007, Empire State Building
Moral and aesthetic obtuseness
Italians in the Crusader states
The age of the city-state in Europe
Enclaves and exclaves
Cold is old
Rich slaves
Five Davids
The Hydra’s heads
Saul, Jonathan and David
~~~
Hizb ut-Tahrir
Getting into MIT
David’s withdrawal and return
Nuclear war in Iraq and Serbia
The gates of Qaraqorum
Turbulent monks – the Pali Tipitaka
A life in London
Uncertainty
Before the deluge
How Muslims are spoken to
~~~
Neo-colonialism: The view from 1969
1897
Colonialism: The view from 1969
Dominica
The Caribbean
Inside Christianity
Lewis Namier and Ulysses
Trevor-Roper’s idea of a theory
Curious Expeditions
Libraries
Rama’s Bridge 2
The Canticle of the Sun
Trams of Karachi
A rough guide to British Malaya
The Red List
Resuscitated languages
Flying
Nawaz Sharif
Seepage into Arabia
The Fertile Crescent
The end of Hellenism
Students in the West
Parochialism
A tale of Troy
The cause of Industry
A rebellious province
The ethos of a heroic age
Rama’s Bridge
Near Jakarta
The village in the jungle
Wafa Sultan
… Or Does It Explode?
Lost buildings
Landscapes
~~~
Latin chronograms
周朝 (Zhōu)
Christians against Roman military service
The Yazidi
At the stroke of the midnight hour
The Persian stimulus
The two cities
The philosopher behind the throne
The World without Us
The Times, 1785-1985
The Old Bailey
Homo hirsutus
Effeminate natives of Asia
Suite française
Optimism about Karachi 3
Optimism about Karachi 2
Norman Cohn
Optimism about Karachi
A hippy gesture
The Chinese nurse
Esperanto
What if Byron had become King of Greece?
Another Alexandrian What if?
Arrival in the country
The journey of Hellenic art
The University of Padua
Berchtesgaden etc
Old Beijing
Caput mundi
The Condor and the Cows
The raid of the Condors
~~~
Ils ne passeront pas!
Five Year Plans
Moscow’s changes of fortune 2
Moscow’s changes of fortune 1
The Papal States
Summorum Pontificum
Río Muni and Fernando Pó
Stony ground: Roman law and Shariah
Benedict XVI and Islam
The world state
Disintegration
~~~
The Royal Society
BLDGBLOG
Scythians
Slovenia
Shanghai and London 2
The Church’s second millennium
America and the Wars of Religion
Shanghai and London
Shanghai
Loggia, arcade and shophouse
~~~
Summer in Algiers
Gustavus Adolphus
Britain and Europe
20 prime ministers in the 19th century
Moving on
20 prime ministers in the 20th century
The differentiation of Greece
This isn’t Shakespeare
Toynbee and Ikeda 2
1919
Illicit Cultural Property
Prussia’s undoing
signandsight.com
The three-generational rule
Strange maps 3
Toynbee and Ikeda
The Ancient Mediterranean View of Man
~~~
Atatürk’s frown
Propaganda and intelligence
~~~
Toynbee, Turkey and Armenia 5
Toynbee, Turkey and Armenia 4
Toynbee, Turkey and Armenia 3
~~~
Edward Elgar, June 2 1857 –
Mount Ararat
Europe, 1916-17
Toynbee, Turkey and Armenia 2
World Brain
Southeast Asian archaeology
~~~
McCluskieganj
The last freedom
Le chant des Africains
The Battle of Algiers
Toynbee, Turkey and Armenia 1
The birth of Turkish nationalism 4
The birth of Turkish nationalism 3
Cutty Sark
The birth of Turkish nationalism 2
The birth of Turkish nationalism 1
~~~
Ticker-tape parades
Hellenistic philosophy and saddened Whigs
The Albert Memorial
Hunter’s Rulers of India
Charles Darwin’s letters
Babur’s horizon
Sachs’s last word
~~~
Shipping timetables
Princely States and British Provinces
The beauty of Greece
The second and third Romes
The wood for the papyri
Wilder shores
Curtain, veil and fez
Adrianople 1929
The Rollinger choir stalls
An Austrian hitchhiker
Minaret of Jam to Matobo Hills
Aerial bombing
The Austrian Adriatic, 1912
Genesis and purpose of the Study
The March of Osman
Paul VI’s travels
The advantages of disunity
Bursting at the seams
Tchaikovsky on communism
Zest, work and Tacitus
Soka Gakkai and Polly Toynbee
Epicureanism, and the middle way
Tōru Takemitsu
Japan’s heroines
Ottoman people and Orthodox churches
People of the Ottoman Empire
~~~
Dummies
The Other Russia
~~~
Japan’s Romans
In black and white
Dancing in the streets
Japan’s heroes (for now)
History
~~~
Resurrection
Reform of calendars
Britain and Palestine
Britain and Egypt
Millennium
Britain and the Arabs in 1964 2
Britain and the Arabs in 1964
Migrations
1984
Ephesus, c AD 57
The crosses of Lithuania and Korea
The divine irony
Strange maps 2
More Alexandrian What ifs
Chaos
The summit of creation
The sun
Constable on Turner
Father and son
~~~
Unequal wars
The Concert of the Powers, 1815-1914
The balance of power in the old Europe
Athens, c AD 52-53
The human symphony
Roman and Sassanian into Umayyad
America 1940
Stories from Herodotus
Historical novels
Norway – Iceland – Greenland – Vinland
Naked Gauls
Thucydides
Elagabalus again
Olmec
Alexandrian What ifs
Archbishop Ussher
The Old Kingdom
Qatar
No Comment
Islam
Pictures of Muhammad 2
Impacts on Russia
Iraq
Fernández-Armesto
Ennin
Impacts on Japan
夏朝 (Xia)
Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s ordeal
Antigone
Leaves and men
Cimmerian darkness
Russia 1945
Celebrations
The change
Respect for nature
Strange maps
Delhi: A Novel
Man’s worship of his own collective power
Hitler’s hands
“Natives”
Pictures of Muhammad
UK 2
Lord Dacre’s ordeal
Planet Earth
Caesar’s withdrawal and return
The UK
Hakluyt Society
Return of the Hyperboreans
Viennese antisemitism
Bunraku
To Delhi, from Farghana and Calcutta
Orthodoxy
The three books
Herodotus the globalist
Prokudin-Gorskii 2
1900
1870 and all that
The frontier spirit
Transatlantic tragedies
American and European world views
Dominus Illuminatio Mea
A peaceful garden in England
Burials before a war
The vanishing point
Historic sieges
Dirk from Breda
~~~
Davos man
The intelligentsia’s function
The Italian senator
The Arab conquests
The Athenian stranger
Existential fear
Is China expansionist?
Strange meeting
The Belgian deportations, Bryce’s statement
The Belgian deportations, 1916
Hyperboreans, Seres, Sinae, Ta Ch’in
~~~
The enigmatic question
An inconvenient truth
~~~
Man the amphibian, or The two paths
The Sun’s chariot
S Rozhdestvom!
An ancient
~~~
Eccentricities of the Emperor Elagabalus
Lactantius, and the Nuremberg Chronicle
Friedrich Hirth
商朝 (Shang)
Idolatry
The range of love
Roman portraits
Dies Natalis Solis Invicti
~~~
Ephesus
A private joke
The Scholars
The Chinese river dolphin
Advice on Muhammad
Ahmadinejad
The return of the native
Waiting for the barbarians 2
Waiting for the barbarians
Aimlessness
Palestine
Structurae
Toynbee
Towards apartheid, c 1930
A sour ferment
Prokudin-Gorskii
The world will be flat
The second Greek Dark Age
Synopsis: Preamble
~~~
A changing library
The silence of Acton
The distraction of Mommsen
Berlin to Baghdad
Lost empires
Anglo-Saxon attitudes
Nojuku 2
Nojuku
Nördlingen
The Indian boy
Intelligentsia
Tales from the Vienna woods
~~~
Lessons of defeat
The end of the Roman Empire, part 2
The end of the Roman Empire
Proletarii
China in 1973
Manners makyth man
Bromsgrove
~~~
Love
The soul of an empire
Mel Gibson in the middle east
Bata-kusai
The view from 1897
~~~
Why choose Graeco-Roman history?
Insulting religion
The position of Mecca
The revelation of Thucydides
Nemesis
The size of Attica
The father of microfinance
What the English have learned
Prehistory in fiction
The sorrowful cycle
Turkish genocide of Armenians
Latin in Hungary
Ghassanids and Lakhmids
The Indian road
The Iamblichan antichurch
Mowgli’s finger
Growing zeal in the late Empire
Adrianople 378
The age of water-transport
Saqi Books
Rising and setting of sun worship
Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire
The exporting of Arianism
Arabs in the Ottoman Empire