Maimed but still magnificent... Europe's mightiest medieval cathedral.

Even historians, who should know better, still seem addicted to the idea that nothing of any consequence occurred between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance.

Success in war underpins the claims to greatness of many presidents.

Some of our best journalists take themselves even more seriously than the politicians they write about.

The product of extraordinary wealth allied to a taste for the sumptuous.

The sense of national catastrophe is inevitably heightened in a television age, when the whole country participates in it.