Simon Scott Plummer
Quixotic Quest Across Spain
The dust-jacket of Christopher Howse’s second book on Spain points to its contents. In the province of Huesca a tiny caterpillar of a train is passing beneath the Cyclopean sugar-loaf rocks of Riglos, a magnet to climbers and home to the griffon vulture. This, then, is not a book about Spanish railways. Rather, the network serves simply as structure for a much wider survey of the country’s past and present.
The Middle Kingdom’s Problem with Religion
Faced with an astonishing revival of Christianity in China, Beijing is reacting with a mixture of alarm, repression and control
Faded Glory: In The Footsteps of Old Fritz
In 1757, Prussia under Frederick the Great celebrated its most famous victories in the Seven Years’ War. The two battlefields at Leuthen and Rossbach are still worth seeing today
In the Steps of the Spanish
Book reviews of Love: A Secret History by Simon May and All About Love by Lisa Appignanesi
Well Worth an Arm and a Leg
Book review of Holy Bones, Holy Dust: How Relics Shaped the History of Medieval Europe by Charles Freeman and Walsingham: Pilgrims and Pilgrimage by Michael Rear
Melancholy Monuments of Chivalry
From Cyprus and Anatolia to Rhodes, the Levant’s castles bear witness to the struggle for supremacy between East and West
Park and Ride
The Olympic juggernaut has trampled over any local council objections to its project. Now it looks like it will do the same to Greenwich Park
Castles of the Imagination
From Wales to Syria, fortresses are monuments to an age of chivalry — but some are only castles in the air
From Treblinka to Tannenberg
A tour through Eastern Poland uncovers the wreckage of German military might
Tolerating the intolerant
“For those who thought that a global pandemic would sound the death knell for identity politics, think again”
How to prevent the next pandemic
‘I have been reporting as a science journalist for years that the world is at increasing risk of pandemics like this; that this was predicted; that we know what we need to do to prepare and we simply haven’t done it; and that more and worse pandemics are coming so we need to do that, now’
D’où parles-tu? The post-truth world
Power, illusion and the open society: how postmodernism undermines our foundational concepts