MICHAEL WOOD ON…
“Traditions constitute the invisible, under-the-surface flow of history”
his summer marks 500 years since the conquest of the Aztecs’ great capital Tenochtitlan by Spanish forces under Hernan Cortes. The 18th-century economist Adam Smith called the “discovery” of the New World and its aftermath one of the greatest events in human history. Maybe he was right. Never before had a whole continent been taken over, its
