Diarmaid MacCulloch

Historians​ make themselves useful by organising thoughts about the past, hacking it into conceptual chunks, some of which take their place in a framework of historical cliché. Most people in Western cultures are comfortable with the terms ‘Middle Ages’ and ‘medieval’ as points of reference, regardless of the way the shifting frontiers of historical research...

Woe​ to royal daughters over the centuries: from the moment of their birth, they were seen as assets to be traded on the international marriage market for the benefit of their families. The bidding for such unions began early, often when the girls were still infants; there would likely be a series of explorations, more or less serious, before one intricate set of negotiations made it to...

In the mid-18th century​ an exceptionally adventurous European traveller might have got as far as a desert region in what is now Arizona, to be rewarded with hospitality from the presiding priest in the stately local mission church. There was likely to have been chocolate to drink, transported from Yucatán some two thousand miles to the south, served in Fr Philipp Segesser von...

The talents​ of historians rarely extend to poetry. I remember reading the TLS of 4 March 1977 and cringing at the discovery that my doctoral supervisor, Geoffrey Elton, had indulged in a penchant for verse, prefacing his review of G.R. Potter’s Life of Huldrych Zwingli with a couplet: ‘Some talk of Martin Luther and some of Calvin (John)/But Zwingli’s hardly mentioned...