East India Company
How to lose an empire
The rise and fall of the Sassoon family, whose yearning for social acceptance brought titles at the cost of success
When young men headed East
The early growth of the Empire was fuelled by spices, not slaves
In the court of the Mughal emperor
Why remember the embarrassing first steps of a giant?
Debunking myths of the Great Divergence
Tirthankar Roy dismisses both nationalist tropes about evil colonialists and imperial assumptions of benevolent liberal intervention
Allsopp’s: the rebirth of the original Burton IPA
The Allsopp family has revived the original Burton IPA which made its name and fortune more than a century ago
An incredible inventory
James Stevens Curl reveals how this new release provides amazing insight into the household of a well-heeled, cultured European in late eighteenth-century India
The anarchy lacks context
Dalrymple’s Anarchy says more about about a selling machine somewhat different to the East India Company
Poor conduct
Shostakovich: Symphonies 4-6 (Decca)
Stories worth telling
Untold Stories (Hyperion)
What do Labour think a conversion therapy is?
There has to be a middle ground between complete denial and complete affirmation
Conservatives can no longer trust institutions
Institutions are only as effective as the people within them and the culture beyond them
Exilic yearnings
Miklos Rozsa: violin concerto (LSO Live)
Office politics
There’s the joker, the slacker, and the bloke who just got fired
Liberal myths of the “good old ways”
Donald Trump’s foreign policy is not so very different from the Democrats’ imagined golden age of American leadership
It’s the money supply, stupid
How the Keynesian blinkers of Democrat economists led to a second Trump victory
Something has gone very wrong with “human rights”
When the “rights” of foreign sex criminals are being prioritised above the safety of Britons, we need change
John Swinney’s Isla Bryson moment?
The Scottish Government must be made to face the facts on sex and gender
Don’t let it go
Communal singing is good for the soul
