James Mather

Saturday

James Mather

City breaks

From our UK edition

The city might have been invented by the Ancient Mesopotamians, but for most of human history urban living has been a decidedly minority pursuit. For 1,000 years before 1800, only 3 per cent of the world’s people were city dwellers. Today that proportion has risen to more than one half and by 2050 it will touch three quarters. With these striking statistics P.D. Smith begins his journey into the urban age (which, it turns out, is all of history and a chunk of prehistory besides). Darting between continents and across millennia, he sets out to show how little the experience of urban living, working and playing ever really changes. Cultures and civilisations vary across time and place, he says, but the city is universal. To understand it is to understand much about humanity itself.

Saturday

James Mather

Holy law

From our UK edition

In the autumn of 1347, the Black Death arrived in Egypt. In the 18 months that followed, mosques turned into mortuaries across North Africa and the Levant. By the time the pestilence had subsided, up to a third of the Muslim world lay dead. Theologians delved into their books and found a comforting spin: infection was a blessing from God, they pronounced, and all believers touched with it were bound for paradise.  The hordes who fled their villages to escape the disease were apparently unconvinced. So too was an Andalusian scholar named Ibn al-Khatib, whose observations showed it to be spread by human contagion, not the hand of the Almighty. Proof taken from the traditions, this man retorted to the jurists, had to yield to the perception of the senses.

Saturday

James Mather

The radical imperialist

From our UK edition

In the summer of 1780, at the height of the Gordon Riots, a London mob raised a cry of ‘kill the lawyers’ and headed for the Inns of Court. In the summer of 1780, at the height of the Gordon Riots, a London mob raised a cry of ‘kill the lawyers’ and headed for the Inns of Court. A militia of several hundred barristers, equipped with muskets but doubtful aim, assembled to guard the Middle Temple.  At the 11th hour they were spared by the intervention of the army, whose firing into the crowd quelled the mayhem.

Saturday

James Mather

Annals of war

From our UK edition

‘I was not an enthusiast about getting US forces and going into Iraq,’ Dick Cheney said in 1997, looking back on the First Gulf War. ‘I was not an enthusiast about getting US forces and going into Iraq,’ Dick Cheney said in 1997, looking back on the First Gulf War. ‘I felt there was a real danger that you would get bogged down in a long drawn-out conflict, that this was a dangerous, difficult part of the world.’ How, half a decade later, was that prescience brushed aside by governments on both sides of the Atlantic in the rush for regime change? The Chilcot Inquiry, whose committee of the great and the good has teased out much about the musings of politicians and mandarins in once smoke-filled rooms, may or may not find the answer.