Sublime

Peter’s famous incognito tours of shipyards in Holland were anticipated in the eagerness of earlier tsars to adopt the bureaucratic and diplomatic methods of the grander European monarchies. Russia’s rulers and churchmen drew on ideas of the magnificent and spiritual from the baroque art and architecture of Central Europe, and adapted them to local

IT WAS SAID that if you were a criminal, a member of some tinpot political party, an agitator for a minority interest group, a drug addict, a property speculator, a forger or bootlegger of any kind, an artist, a fashion designer, a writer, underground film director, musician, or just plain crazy, Berlin was where you would eventually end up. It see

of cherry-picking

Unless forcibly coerced, people adopt new cultural values and material expressions of identity because they see them as socially advantageous. Warriors, pirates, refugees, economic migrants and family followings all have their place in any picture of the emerging native societies of Early Medieval Britain. A seemingly inescapable concentration on,

Turning their back on a maritime future may have been a concession to their gentry officials (who disliked eunuch influence), but it was also a bow to financial constraints and the supreme priority of dynastic survival.