David Abulafia

“Many, perhaps most, books about Israel are full of tendentious delusions. This is one of the worst examples”

The anti-Semitism now rampant in Labour’s left-wing ruling elite has deep roots in history — but the party leader has no objection to it

The second instalment of Simon Schama’s history of the Jewish people is typically energetic but has some serious failings

The colourful life of Steven Runciman: historian, scholar-diplomat, and possibly spy

“Jean-Claude Juncker is not the first Luxembourger to imagine he can dictate the future of Europe”

Brendan Simms’s new book places Britain at the centre of European history in unexpected and stimulating ways

Universities should not impose quotas on privately educated students. It is a crude tool which may exclude those from humble backgrounds

There is a fresh wind blowing among historians. In the universities, the writing of increasingly recondite monographs, suitably stuffed with the jargon of the trade, has for too long been seen as the route to academic promotion, regardless of whether anyone buys or reads, let alone understands, what the author is trying to say. Abstractions such as “alterity” that are entirely alien to the period and region under examination are deployed with abandon; “discourses” abound; and if the phrase “memory and identity” is not in the title, one is clearly not a truly serious scholar.

The negative image of Gypsies that persists today is the result of centuries-old xenophobia, misrepresentation and downright fantasy