The French Revolution soon turned into a rout of women’s rights. In 1804, the Napoleonic Code reaffirmed a husband’s authority over his wife and the Bourbon Restoration rescinded the right to divorce...

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Myths that sought to explain American history and chart a path to the future once helped to bind the country together. Today, they are absorbed into the culture wars, reflecting divergent understandings...

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Wild Resistance: Adorno's Aesthetics

Owen Hatherley, 6 June 2024

Adorno’s aesthetics are extreme. ‘He is an easy man to caricature,’ Ben Watson writes, ‘because he believed in exaggeration as a means of telling the truth.’ He is frequently, and rightly, upbraided...

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After its fall, outsiders speculated that the Cuban regime would collapse and the island would transition, quickly or slowly, to capitalism. But then interested countries have always persuaded themselves...

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Historians argue that the Venetian ghetto was both an open-air prison and a bright spot in the darkness of early modern European antisemitism. The government confined Jews to a ghetto, but did not expel...

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Pimps and Prodigals: Medieval Minstrels

Irina Dumitrescu, 23 May 2024

Minstrels provided art as entertainment, but also, in a time before the mechanical production and reproduction of sound, laboured to make a wide range of noises appropriate for various occasions.

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The legiones were open only (with rare exceptions) to citizens; non-citizens had to join the less well paid, less prestigious auxilia, and were rewarded on retirement after 25 years’ service (assuming...

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Ladders last a long time: Reading Raphael Samuel

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, 23 May 2024

Raphael Samuel​ set out his stall as a practitioner of ‘people’s history’. This was a capacious category: it could be liberal, radical, nationalist or socialist; macro or microhistorical.

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The unmistakable – and powerful – stereotype of the ‘good Italian’ permeates the perception of Italian behaviour in the 20th century, especially in wartime, both within and outside Italy.

Read more about Captain Corelli’s Machine-Gun: Italian Counterfactuals

Maldoror honoured independence struggles in Africa and other parts of the world throughout her life. But she wouldn’t set aside her values as a filmmaker in the name of a cause: ways of seeing had to...

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Seagull Soup: HMS Wager

Fara Dabhoiwala, 9 May 2024

The captain of HMS Wager had shot dead an unarmed sailor. Other men had been found murdered. The captain had been imprisoned by his own marines, and then left behind on the island by most of the crew....

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Frost-tempered: Russia in Central Asia

Greg Afinogenov, 25 April 2024

Though people like Vasily Vereshchagin often castigated the British for the arrogance and cruelty of their brand of imperialism, in practice the Russians were no better. Clichés such as Russia being ‘between...

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Trickes of the Clergye: Atheistical Thoughts

Alexandra Walsham, 25 April 2024

In an environment in which binary thinking prevailed, atheism was a potent ‘other’ against which devout Christianity defined itself. At its most extreme, this line of interpretation has led to the...

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Whenever I read claims about ‘forgotten women’, I want to ask: ‘By whom?’ Feminists? Society? The ‘culture’? And why ‘forgotten’? Forgetting presupposes something once known, but the general...

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On Pockets

Susannah Clapp, 25 April 2024

Routinely sewn into male but not into female clothing, they have helped men make their way through the world, fully equipped, as if they were armoured vehicles or portable garden sheds.

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Where does culture come from?

Terry Eagleton, 25 April 2024

Marxism is about leisure, not labour. The only good reason for being a socialist, apart from annoying people you don’t like, is that you don’t like to work.

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At the Capitoline Museums: ‘Fidia’

Christopher Siwicki, 25 April 2024

The Parthenon was Pericles’ great project. Phidias’ role in its construction isn’t clear; Plutarch says that the architects were Callicrates and Ictinus. Phidias is sometimes cast as a works supervisor,...

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Mrs Berkshire went swiftly upstairs and put a bold eye to the keyhole. When she did, she saw that Pratt and Smith’s trousers were down. Later, in court, she confirmed that she had seen both men’s private...

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