Dan Carlin - Caesar at Hastings

Ernest Renan, “What is a Nation?”, text of a conference delivered at the Sorbonne on March 11th, 1882, in Ernest Renan, Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?, Paris, Presses-Pocket, 1992. (translated by Ethan Rundell)

I propose to analyze with you an idea which, though apparently clear, lends itself to the most dangerous misunderstandings. The forms of human society are of the greatest variety. They include great agglomerations of men after the fashion of China, Egypt, and ancient Babylonia; tribes such as the Hebrews and the Arabs; city-states on the Athenian and Spartan model; reunions of diverse countries such as were to be found under the Carolingian Empire; communities such as the Israelites and the parsis, lacking a country and maintained by religious bonds; nations like France, England, and most other modern, autonomous polities; confederations after the fashion of Switzerland and America; the great families that race, or rather language, has established between the different branches of Germans, the different branches of Slavs. Such are the types of groupings that exist, or rather existed, and that one confuses only at the price of the most serious inconvenience. At the time of the...

Could the Soviet Union Have Survived?

We ask four historians whether the demise of one of the 20th century’s superpowers was as inevitable as it now seems. Soviet poster dedicated to the fifth anniversary of the October Revolution and IV Congress of the Communist International, 1922. Wiki Commons. ‘No one has suggested a convincing alternative scenario’ Rodric Braithwaite, British Ambassador to the Soviet Union (1988-91) and author of Armageddon and Paranoia: the Nuclear Confrontation (Profile, 2017). People still argue about the fall of the Roman Empire. They are not going to agree quickly on why the Soviet Union collapsed when it did. Some think it could have lasted for many years, others that the collapse was unforeseeable. Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet dissident scientist, foresaw it decades before it happened. Victory in war took the Soviet armies to the centre of Europe, where they stayed. The Soviet Union’s seductive ideology had already given it influence across the world. But after Stalin’s death in...

8 Viking myths busted

Bearded, violent beyond reason and singularly successful at suppressing everyone around them. This, says Janina Ramirez, is the popular – yet questionable – image of Vikings. But how violent were they really, and did they actually wear horned helmets? These are myths that need to be unpicked The Viking Age stretched from the ninth to the 11th century. During this time Viking culture had a huge impact on great swathes of Europe, Asia, Africa and even America – many centuries before Columbus sailed the oceans. They could navigate the known world and commanded respect wherever they went. Yet the Vikings are surrounded by myths. Here are eight of them busted… 1 Myth 1: They wore horned helmets Let’s get this out of the way straight off. There is no evidence that the Vikings wore horned helmets, and nothing like this has ever been discovered in any archaeological dig. They certainly wore helmets but they would have been simple skullcaps, designed to protect the he...

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