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The irony was delicious: Gordon Brown, Labour party leader and one-time editor of the socialist Red Paper on Scotland, and Wen Jiabao, premier of the People's Republic of China, standing [...]

As I write, highly educated if wholly uncivilised human beings are travelling underground, trying to kill me. But their aim is to murder more than just me, or you. Despite [...]

May was the month in which the west was won. On orders from President Jefferson, the great American pioneers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark left St Louis on 14 May [...]

In the new Labour Party, the scarlet standard is out, the Union flag in: but ministers are still confused about patriotism. In October last year, Tony Blair circulated a note [...]

Why do all politicians now need a 'narrative'? Tristram Hunt blames French intellectuals According to sympathetic accounts, the Conservative Party lost the general election because it did not have a [...]

THE WORLD FOR A SHILLING Michael Leapman Headline, 308pp, £14.99 £11.99 at www.newstatesman.co.uk (+£1 p&p) In an age when it takes six years not to build a national football stadium, [...]

Within days of the election result, Tony Blair could have made the most crucial decisions of the second term, writes Tristram Hunt The days following an election provide a decisive [...]

Tristram Hunt on how historians of Victorian England influenced George W Bush On Saturday 20 January, George W Bush will raise his hand, lock his jaw and hide his trademark [...]

Obsessed by a fear of revolution, haunted by a collapse of faith, it yet nurtured great minds, great art and a kind of socialism Although it is said Margaret Thatcher [...]

Richard Rogers, our most influential architect of urban regeneration, should find his vision in Britain's past rather than in her neighbours. Despite the great contribution of Harvey Nichols to Leeds, [...]

Tristram Hunt argues that the Chancellor is an essentially Dickensian character In the run-up to the 1983 election campaign, Margaret Thatcher discovered 'Victorian values'. The Victorian age, she decreed, had [...]

Michael Gove's statement in support of Brexit stands out not only as an elegant piece of writing, but as perhaps the most articulate argument offered by the various 'Vote Leave' [...]

High Minds: the Victorians and the Birth of Modem Britain Simon Heffer Random House, 896pp, £30 Not everyone was convinced that the Great Exhibition of 1851 would work. 'An exhibition […]

An Intelligent Person's Guide to Education Tony Little Bloomsbury, z88pp, 16.99 £ This is an interesting book with an execrable title. Coming from the retiring headmaster of Eton College, An [...]

Does the seizure of the Labour leadership north and south of the border by Presbyterian progeny signal the revival of religion in British public life? Both Gordon Brown and Wendy […]

A Mad, Bad and Dangerous People?: England 1783-1846 Boyd Hilton Oxford University Press, 784pp, £30 For a long time now, uncomfortable gaps have disfigured the multi-volume New Oxford History of [...]

Victorian London: the life of a city (1840-1870) Liza Picard Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 368pp, £20 Rarely can the character of London have been analysed more extensively than over the past [...]

While land reform has been alive in British radical thinking since 1066, it was an American who managed to craft the first credible programme for change. Medieval critics of the […]

By far the most entertaining programme in the current BBC series on the National Trust is the one on the tussle over Lennon House in Liverpool. Described acidly by Simon [...]

There are few testimonies to the triumph of the capitalist will more elegant than Grand Central Terminal in New York City. The brainchild of the legendary US robber baron 'Commodore' [...]

In 1974, the Victoria and Albert Museum hosted an exhibition entitled 'The Destruction of the Country House'. The cry then was 'heritage in danger', and an influential establishment combination of [...]

Oliver Cromwell, the man who banned Christmas, is back in vogue. After Simon Schama's elegant TV account of Britain's one and only military dictator came Channel 4's 90-minute-long defence of [...]

Here's something the Tory party certainly has not learned from this month's American elections. George Osborne might have thought it was all about gay marriage, modernity and minority votes, but [...]

In the 2003 book Stasiland, Anna Funder documents what life was like for millions of people in East Germany, the inaptly named German Democratic Republic, before the fall of the [...]

What Might Have Been: imaginary history from 12 leading historians Edited by Andrew Roberts Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 224pp, £12.99 EH Carr once dismissed 'what if?' history as an 'idle parlour […]

The recent sectarian clashes at Holy Cross school remind me of when we were filming in Northern Ireland. The first person to greet me in Portadown was a wiry Ulsterman [...]