Published in 1893, Oman’s history remains a dazzling narrative of the centuries after Rome’s fall, and complicates the darkness traditionally ascribed to them. Battle of Tours (732), by Charles de Steuben (1837) Sir Charles Oman For a modern reader, the very title ‘The Dark Ages’ is a red flag. Over decades, we have been well-schooled by academia to treat the phrase “the Dark Ages” with a mixture of condescension and linguistic allergy. To speak of the five centuries followin

With two books in his name, award-winning author Tushar Chatterji has steadily carved a space for himself in contemporary and literary fiction while managing his corporate responsibilities. His debut book, “Behind Those Eyes", narrated through canine perspectives, is an exploration of love, loyalty, resilience, and loss. Tushar’s second, “Becoming Her", turns its gaze towards six women navigating identity, relationships, expectations, and the complicated yet deeply personal a

Vladimir Dedijer’s long-neglected The Road to Sarajevo remains one of the finest guides to the assassination that changed the course of the twentieth century. Later this month, on July 28th, the world will quietly pass the 112th anniversary of one of history’s defining moments. On that day in 1914, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Within days, Europe’s elaborate alliance system would lurch into motion. By August, the Continent, which had largely been at peace for nearl

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 positive