Is this the age of dictators?” asked veteran journalist Sir Sidney Low. He was writing in September 1923, the month in which a military coup brought Miguel Primo de Rivera to power in Spain. At the sa

In a prisoner-of-war camp in western Ukraine, a former miner from the east is being interviewed about how he ended up fighting for Russia. His speech is slurred and one arm paralysed: the results not

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” Antonio Gramsci’s words, written in prison near Bari almost 100 years ago, ring out to us now. The politi

SEVEN TIMES IN EIGHT DAYS, U.S. PRESIDENT DONALD Trump promised to come to the aid of Iranian protesters if the country’s authoritarian regime began killing them in the streets. When it did—slaying th

A round 3.30pm on 30 April 1945, Adolf Hitler shot himself in his Berlin bunker. Minutes later, his still warm body was carried outside by loyal staffers and burned in the Reich Chancellery gardens. H

‘Green sickness’, also known as the ‘disease of virgins’ – a diagnosis applied mainly to teenage girls from the 16th to the 19th centuries – is one of the most puzzling conditions in the history of me