Sir Richard Steele takes up arms against the kind of wit who thinks you can be as nasty as you like provided you make people laugh.

Social niceties are essential for the smooth operation of society, but neither boxing a man’s ears nor calling in the lawyers will bring them back.

Amid the Don Pacifico Affair, William Gladstone told Lord Palmerston that pride in his own country did not excuse bossing others about like a global schoolmaster.

A few years before the Battle of Agincourt, the Duke of Orléans challenged King Henry IV to meet him in Bordeaux for a winner-takes-all joust.

A few weeks after a large French raiding party had been driven away from the Isle of Wight, another flotilla arrived from across the Channel demanding money with menaces.

In all his years of soldiering at home and abroad, Major-General George Younghusband had never heard British soldiers talk like those in Kipling’s tales.