Shoumojit Banerjee

If you thought Lawrence of Arabia (1962) was the only great desert classic, think again. Overshadowed for decades by David Lean’s masterpiece, Khartoum (1966) remains one of the great neglected historical epics. Directed by Basil Dearden and anchored by commanding performances from Charlton Heston and Laurence Olivier, it deserves a place alongside the decade’s finest large-scale historical dramas. While it falls short of the towering achievement of Lawrence of Arabia, it remains a worthy...

250 years after its publication, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire remains the supreme meditation on the mortality of civilisations. Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) In the 1980s, German historian Alexander Demandt attempted to catalogue every explanation ever proposed for the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE. In ‘Der Fall Roms’ (1984), Demandt detailed more than two hundred causes that led to Rome’s collapse, from the eminently plausible to the positively whimsical....

Xi Jinping’s invocation of the ‘Thucydides Trap’ revives the long shadow of the Peloponnesian War and asks whether America and China are repeating history’s oldest great-power mistakes. AI generated image During last week’s summit in Beijing with U.S. President Donald Trump, Xi Jinping once again summoned the ghosts of ancient Greece. The Chinese leader warned that Beijing and Washington must avoid falling into the ‘Thucydides Trap,’ the now-famous formulation popularised by political...