Sublime

Nowhere was this Nazi attitude towards the Eastern Front more evident than in the Warsaw Rising of August 1944. An Allied capital containing nearly a million people had risen against

These paradoxes became very apparent during the Warsaw Rising of 1944. The Polish Home Army had assumed that it was fighting ‘the Germans’, and the appalling massacres of civilians that took place are generally denounced as ‘German atrocities’. Yet the picture looks rather different if examined in detail. The Wehrmacht was loath to release units fr

By enlarging Old Europe into a new Euro-Atlantic ‘world’, the Occidentals had acquired hinterlands as varied and extensive as those of the Islamic realm or East Asia. There was much less evidence in the later early modern age that this great enlargement in territorial scale would also bring about the internal transformation to which Europe’s subseq

Unlike the great offshore land masses of Greenland and Newfoundland, these islands were hospitable, colonizable and readily accessible to seaborne invaders. They could be conquered piecemeal and quickly reinforced from Europe. Their indigenous populations lacked adequate military organization and were tragically vulnerable to Old World diseases. Cr

While Spain at the western end of the Mediterranean was establishing its dominion in the Americas, the Ottomans had carved out, against much tougher opponents and on a far grander scale, a vast tri-continental empire, assembling in Busbecq’s awed phrase ‘the might of the whole East’.

Far from imagining a common supremacy over the rest of Eurasia, European statecraft was obsessed with intramural conflicts. Symptomatically, the wealth of the New World was used to finance the dynastic ambitions of the Old.