The irony was delicious: Gordon Brown, Labour party leader and one-time editor of the socialist Red Paper on Scotland, and Wen Jiabao, premier of the People's Republic of China, standing side by side in the Great Hall of the People discussing how best to invest Beijing's £100bn sovereign wealth fund in the City of London. Accompanied by Sir Richard Branson, the director of the CBI and China's corporate nomenklatura, Brown [...]

Does the seizure of the Labour leadership north and south of the border by Presbyterian progeny signal the revival of religion in British public life? Both Gordon Brown and Wendy Alexander are self-consciously "children of the manse": happy, we are told, to bring their Protestant sensibility to bear upon public policy. Whether it is opposing supercasinos, or rolling back cannabis liberalisation, or calling for a "coalition of conscience" against the [...]

For a long time now, uncomfortable gaps have disfigured the multi-volume New Oxford History of England. Chief among these are the years between the early 1780s and the 1840s - the epoch of industrialisation, the French revolution and the Napoleonic wars. With the arrival of Boyd Hilton's A Mad, Bad and Dangerous People? this historical void has finally been filled.

Hilton, a professor at Cambridge, has written a lively and [...]

Rarely can the character of London have been analysed more extensively than over the past few weeks. The announcement of the city's success in bidding to host the 2012 Olympic Games prompted excited talk of the capital's rejuvenation: Trafalgar Square, scene of violent anti-poll tax riots 15 years earlier, played host to a spectacle of civic self-congratulation. The raw horror of the 7 July bombings swiftly put paid to such [...]

As I write, highly educated if wholly uncivilised human beings are travelling underground, trying to kill me. But their aim is to murder more than just me, or you. Despite the appeasing rationalisations of John Pilger - that it wouldn't happen if only we cut and run from Iraq, or if we stopped supporting Israel - these terrorists are engaged in an assault on our way of life. As the [...]

While land reform has been alive in British radical thinking since 1066, it was an American who managed to craft the first credible programme for change. Medieval critics of the "Norman Yoke", the Diggers and Levellers of the English civil war, and the 18th-century opponents of land enclosure had all longed without success for the return of a golden age in which land would be equitably distributed according to need. [...]

May was the month in which the west was won. On orders from President Jefferson, the great American pioneers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark left St Louis on 14 May 1804, and followed the Missouri River across the Great Plains into the uncharted west. In doing so, they helped to define America both as a nation of hardy frontiersmen untroubled by the obstacles of nature and as a land of [...]

E H Carr once dismissed "what if?" history as an "idle parlour game". Its defenders claim it contributes substantially to our understanding of the past. According to the historian Robert Cowley, "Counter-factual speculations can help to awaken and nourish our historical imaginations." But, with a couple of exceptions, the essays in this volume seem to suggest that Carr's assessment is the more accurate one.

Anne Somerset's spectacularly light-weight essay on [...]

By far the most entertaining programme in the current BBC series on the National Trust is the one on the tussle over Lennon House in Liverpool. Described acidly by Simon Jenkins as "considerably more genteel than the McCartney house", the former Beatle's home is situated on a dual carriageway in Woolton, enjoying "the rendered exterior, canted windows and hipped roof of tens of thousands of inter-war houses of the New [...]

There are few testimonies to the triumph of the capitalist will more elegant than Grand Central Terminal in New York City. The brainchild of the legendary US robber baron "Commodore" Cornelius Vanderbilt, its every marble and iron detail exudes the pioneer spirit of enterprise and thirst for commerce which made New York the 20th-century capital of the world. Yet it is also a peculiarly democratic civic space, its long concourses [...]