Head to Head

Modernity is a ubiquitous phenomenon which defines the age in which we are living, heralding progress and enlightenment – does it even exist?

The spiritual marketplace is crowded – is there something Darwinian about it?

Where fraught national histories are concerned, do policies of remembrance and education work, or is it better to wipe the slate clean?

Surrealism – as formulated in André Breton’s manifesto a century ago in October 1924 – is regarded as one of the First World War’s artistic legacies. What are the others?

How do dissent and disagreement tip over into civil war? And is peace, when it comes, ever absolute?

East was East and West was West – until 1989. The Wall is gone, but are its Cold War demarcations still there?

Does a state need a book of rules by which to operate? And who are those rules for, anyway?

History is built with words. How have historians filled the silence that came before?

An old-fashioned feature of a fusty, inegalitarian past, when did the British stop knowing their place?

So called because it passed without a shot being fired, the Carnation Revolution of 25 April 1974 brought Portugal’s authoritarian Estado Novo to an end. Could the state have survived?