''Tot es mort, torz son mortz" - "Everything is dead, everyone is dead." So wrote a scribe in late 1348 in Millau, southern France, on a register containing the terms of a contract for work on the town walls. The Black Death was the deadliest epidemiological crisis in history. In Venice, at least three-quarters of the population died. Florence was so devastated that for a long time the disease was [...]

In the summer of 1978, I arrived in Romania to find the whole place leaning at an impossible angle. It was a year since a huge earthquake had ripped across the country, and those buildings which hadn't collapsed instantly were now tottering and slanting, as if drunk. These precarious structures were propped up by long, stripped tree trunks. It was a surreal sight, even in a country that had accustomed [...]

From Leighton Buzzard to Zurich - what a miserable pilgrimage route to death this must have been for Robert and Jennifer Stokes, the couple who killed themselves recently by drinking sodium pentobarbital poison (£55 a pop, under the auspices of the Swiss non-profit organisation Dignitas). Had they travelled to Rome, or Rio de Janeiro, or Barcelona, perhaps the clouds in their minds might have lifted just briefly enough to see [...]

The attack was unannounced, brutally swift, and it "startled us like some gigantic, dissonant fireball in the night of our false security". So wrote the American diplomatist David Bruce, as he recalled the attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. Its ghastly memory was revived this week as the towers of the World Trade Center exploded into flames.

The comparison drawn by commentators between the two events achieved an [...]

My natural orbit doesn't usually swing me into close proximity to people like Henry Kissinger and Christopher Hitchens. I suppose I should be grateful, as meeting them both (though not, you will appreciate, at the same time) has not been an undiluted pleasure. Both men have mighty egos, so in order to avoid unnecessary offence, I call chronology to my aid. I met Kissinger first.

It was a Monday morning [...]

"Have you seen Encounter?" Mary McCarthy asked Hannah Arendt in October 1953, after reading the debut issue. "It is surely the most vapid thing yet, like a college magazine got out by long-dead and putrefying undergraduates." McCarthy was not alone in denigrating Encounter. Anthony Hartley, also in October 1953, remarked somewhat prophetically that "it would be a pity if Encounter, in its turn, were to become a mere weapon in [...]