Engelsberg ideas

There are plenty of podcasts for young men feeling lost.

Sarah O’Connor is a columnist, reporter and associate editor at the Financial Times, who writes a weekly column on the world of work.

Raoul Glaber, an 11th-century French Benedictine monk, frequently recorded his experiences in a diary.

The Fall of Republics: A History from Ancient Carthage to the American Constitution, Thomas F.

On 8 July 2021 – a mere five weeks before Taliban forces seized Kabul – President Biden was asked whether he saw any parallels between the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the end of the Vietnam War five decades earlier.

It is 90 years this month since the Trial of the Sixteen, which commenced Stalin’s Great Purge of veteran Bolshevik rivals, among whom Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev were the most prominent.

Genuine world orders are historical anomalies, but almost every analyst, it seems, yearns for one.

For the first time in decades, there is a real sense of urgency about British security policy.

Gérard Grisey was a French composer in thrall to the acoustical properties of sound.

The Twitnam Summer: Friendship, Satire and the Writing of Gulliver’s Travels, Hester Grant, William Collins, £25 Early in the 18th century, the Middlesex village of Twickenham began to be noticed by Londoners wearying of the metropolis, drawn by the attra…

The Tragedy of Soviet Market Economists: The Failed Quest to Civilise Russia, 1972-2022, Tobias Rupprecht, Cambridge University Press, £32 The 1990s in Russia are the stuff of myth.

It smells like the tanned skin of a guy with gomina in his hair stepping out of the shower wearing a pre-WWI British dandified fragrance: citrus, flowers, musk.

‘There is no common threat that we have put in writing,’ said Turkey’s foreign minister Hakan Fidan when quizzed about his country’s new defence pact with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

Never say that Finns don’t have religion.

Most pitches I now receive are clearly leeched from large language models (LLM).

Haydn’s piano sonatas should be better known – and more frequently played than they are – elegant trifles they are not.

This summer, the United States of America is celebrating the 250th anniversary of its Declaration of Independence.

Zhou Enlai did not actually reply ‘It’s too early to tell’ when asked about the long-term effects of the French Revolution.

October 1889 found Captain Francis Younghusband, a British officer in the 1st King’s Dragoon Guards, skirting the foothills of the Pamir Mountains.

In 1975, Martin Scorsese visited Britain.

If one American statesman can be considered a truly Janus-like figure, applying the lessons of history to the strategic landscape of the present, it must be Henry Kissinger.

Air, Christian Kracht, translated by Daniel Bowles, Serpent’s Tail, £12.99 The Swiss writer Christian Kracht is contemporary fiction’s great thrasher of expectations.

Veldhoven, a quiet and comfortable town in the southern Netherlands, does not seem like the kind of place that should be on the frontlines of geo-economic competition between the United States and China.

Presence: A Hidden History of the Female Body, Erin Maglaque, Jonathan Cape, £25 As a young scholar, the historian Erin Maglaque saw herself chiefly as a brain.

Michelangelo Antonioni once spoke of freddezza morale – ‘moral coldness’ – as the defining theme of one of his early films, Chronicle of a Love (1950), though the phrase is apt to mislead if it suggests melodramatic wickedness or even ordinary selfishness.

Blood Dawn: World War II and the Making of Modern Asia, Hans van de Ven, Basic Books, £30 I really wanted to enjoy this book.

The New START treaty – enforced since 2011 and the last remaining arms‑control agreement between the United States and Russia – expired in February 2026 with nothing to replace it.

At dawn on 3 October 2009, Camp Keating, a vulnerably exposed US Army outpost in Afghanistan’s Nuristan Province, within the Hindu Kush mountain range, came under sustained attack from Taliban fighters.

On 11 June, the conflagration in Ukraine was recorded as having lasted for 1,569 days.

Rigby’s Encyclopaedia of the Herring: Adventures with the King of Fishes, Graeme Rigby, Hurst, £25 Not many encyclopedias have a hero.

In the summer of 1895, at the new Queen’s Hall in London’s West End, Sir Henry Wood conducted the first-ever ‘Promenade Concert’.

Even for a country whose politics are as noisy and dramatic as the Philippines, the breakup and subsequent bitter feud between the Marcoses and the Dutertes has been a shocking affair, bringing to blows two of the country’s most powerful families.

Konrad Adenauer is not a figure usually associated with the Suez Crisis.

Ceuta, suddenly in the spotlight of European news, is a narrow strip of rock where the Mediterranean meets the Atlantic, an exclave separated from the Spanish mainland by the Strait of Gibraltar.

Tensions between the United States and Iran have reached a new fever-pitch following a reported Iranian drone strike on a US-owned gas storage vessel at Egypt’s Port of Damietta and missile attacks on US forces stationed in Jordan, prompting American reta…

Given the recent drama in Westminster, one could be forgiven for overlooking the news that Poland and the United Kingdom recently signed a major security agreement.

Resurgence and Revolution: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight in Turkey and Syria, Aliza Marcus, NYU Press, £22 It is nearly 20 years since Aliza Marcus released Blood and Belief, her seminal book on the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK.

‘Where does the North of England really begin?’

Abhijeet Dipke appeared tired but content earlier this week as he addressed supporters in a video celebrating the blow his viral ‘Cockroach’ movement had dealt to India’s establishment.

Two themes dominate Japan’s elite thinking at present: a blend of awe and fear about the ambitions of Japan’s powerful prime minister, Sanae Takaichi; and concerns about the US-Japan security alliance.

Last October I was lucky to be within the intimacy of London’s Wigmore Hall to witness Mitsuko Uchida perform Beethoven’s three final piano sonatas, Ops 109-111.

Mankind now makes most things better.

Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Simon & Schuster, £28 Ghengis Khan.

The Butterfly Season: On Beginnings, Endings, and the Life in Between, Lea Korsgaard (translated from the Danish by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg), Particular Books, £24 In 2010 the nature writer Patrick Barkham published The Butterfly Isles, a book that has

The period 1914-45 offers both sharp contrasts and intriguing similarities with previous geopolitical eras in the Baltic Sea region.

British Choral Singing: A History from Medieval Times to the Present Day, Peter Ward Jones, Boydell Press, £115 A performance of Handel’s Messiah at the BBC Proms’ ‘Choral Day’ in 2024 encapsulated the richness of the British choral-singing landscape.

Myths and symbols persist, and the most persistent myth of British military leadership is that of military genius, symbolised by the kingfisher bird.

In 1973 the musicologist Henry-Louis de la Grange published the first volume of his landmark biography of Gustav Mahler.

Have you ever wanted to turn the clock back in history, not to go back to some supposedly halcyon age, but to head off hell?

The rise of Sweden’s Hilma af Klint to art-world superstardom has been nothing less than meteoric.