In Peace in Ireland, his recent book on the Northern Irish Troubles, Richard Bourke tells a revealing story about Richard Crossman, secretary of state for social services during Harold Wilson's government of 1966-70. Referring to riots that had occurred at the Orange parades of 12 July 1969, Crossman wrote in his diary: "There had been commotions on St Patrick's Day, it may have been."

Although Northern Ireland no longer poses [...]

The fate of the oil under the Caspian Sea illustrates how the worlds before and after the Russian revolution appear to join up, as if Soviet rule were a hiatus and history has taken up where it left off as the Bolsheviks triumphed in Moscow. At the beginning of the 20th century, the oilfields of Azerbaijan made Russia the world's biggest oil producer. The boom brought investors from Europe to [...]

The capture of William Joyce by the British army is one of the stranger and more absurd episodes of his life as the reviled Lord Haw-Haw, the upper-class English voice of Nazi Germany. As the Third Reich collapsed, Joyce tried to escape capture by the Allies by getting out of Germany to Sweden, a neutral country. Joyce and his wife were held up near the Danish border. One day in [...]

In October 1913, Hamilton Fyfe, a star foreign correspondent on the Daily Mail, dashed off a letter to his employer, Lord Northcliffe, from an assignment in Monterrey, northern Mexico. "Last week we had a two-day battle here. Bullets making funny little noise all about the streets, and shells knocking holes in house walls. I nipped about, enjoying it immensely. There were some horrible sights of course. Imagine a big square [...]

The wars of history always seem more momentous and calamitous than those about to come upon us. As the US and Britain prepared to invade Iraq we continued to go to the sales, pick the children up from school and watch the football. The poet Louis MacNeice remembered how he spent the day before war was declared, in 1939, drinking in a bar in Dublin with his literary friends: "They [...]

The Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce dismissed journalism as "writings without any originality or profundity [crafted by] men with few mental scruples and almost no aesthetic sensibility". It wouldn't be hard to think of examples to bear out his thesis, but the work of Joseph Roth would not be one of them. His writings about Berlin during the 1920s - collected here for the first time in English - establish a [...]

Last May, the Irish Times published an article on its comment pages that began with the question: "What if Ireland was British?" It was the kind of heretical, counter-intuitive speculation that even the Times - the voice of Irish pluralist dissent - might once have expected its contributors to have left behind in university debating chambers. The writer contrasted the decorum of the Queen Mother's funeral with "an almost ritual [...]

In Only a Game?, his classic book about life as a footballer at Millwall in the Second Division during the 1973-74 season, Eamon Dunphy wrote of how "football is about self-deception as much as anything else". His diary of a disillusioned season among journeymen professionals was a sustained attempt to break free of falsity, both his own and that of a game beginning more and more to resemble showbiz. Veering [...]

In the autumn of 1988, at the Sheraton Hotel in San Salvador, I found myself having a drink with garrulous men in polo shirts. They were from Arena, the party of the Salvadorean oligarchy: coffee-estate proprietors, landowners and former officers who looked to the army and the licensed death squads to protect them from revolution. About that time, Arena was trying to become slightly more respectable. But only a few [...]

The story of the literary hoax perpetrated by Binjamin Wilkomirski has been widely rehearsed. In 1995, he published a memoir, Fragments, telling of the relentless cruelty he suffered as a child survivor of the Nazi concentration camps of Majdanek and Auschwitz. He described being smuggled into a Swiss orphanage and eventually adopted by a bourgeois Swiss family who conspired, in league with the rest of Swiss society, to erase his [...]