History & Classics

The rise of democracy coincided with the transition from wood to coal, and decolonisation in the 20th century precipitated the growth of fertiliser consumption, air travel, motor vehicles and industrial...

Claude Villiaume’s clients appear to have been happy to embrace the notion of arbitrary fortune. For men it turned matchmaking into a game, and helped to explain failure. Women, often steeped in romantic...

Mossad relied heavily on assorted European security agencies for intelligence on Palestinian activities. Not only did they often provide the intelligence Mossad needed to select its targets, they also...

For all its various forms of sophistication, the ultimate motive of gay history is often a search for people like us, even if they might not have recognised themselves as such. Untypical relationships,...

Marx was a keen student of early modern English history and it was in this period that he located the decisive shift towards an economy organised around the production of commodities. The many women spinning...

Solidarity with Commune veterans on the part of British working-class movements was usually more symbolic than active. Plenty of ‘Vive la Commune!’ and ‘Down with Capitalism!’, but no barricades...

Clothing, for Caravaggio, worked in the same way as his chiaroscuro, dramatising disclosure and reticence, attraction and concealment. Caravaggio exploits dress not so much as a language, but as a way...

The origin legend was a widespread medieval genre used to account not only for peoples and nations, but also for the rise of cities, dynasties, monasteries and even landscape features. To know who we are,...

Intelligence – whether rumour, gossip, hearsay or clandestine leaks – was central to ambassadorial activity. Henry Wotton’s unusual status as a resident Protestant ambassador in a Catholic state...

Week​ after week, year after year, members of the collective formed in 1977, during the Argentine military dictatorship, as Las Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo have circled the pyramid monument in the square...

The Ark Encounter is an attempt to recreate Noah’s ark from the account in Genesis. A shuttle bus takes visitors from the car park through a verdant landscape to a neo-Assyrian building called the Answers...

In early modern Europe, news took many forms. It could be words exchanged by the people who haunted Venice’s Rialto. You might hear news in a barbershop, a pharmacy or a London coffee house; out in the...

The absence of critical or fresh perspectives on Egyptology and its history, or any of the decolonial approaches that are debated by archaeologists and Egyptologists today, subverts any claims for restitution....

Suetonius, writing in the early second century, is notorious for the salacious details he shared of the depraved sex lives and sadistic murder sprees of the early Roman emperors, but there’s more to...

Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, better known as El Cid, cultivated his own personal army, made up of both Christians and Muslims, rewarding their loyalty with the spoils of plunder. How did a warlord who pillaged...

Edmund Burke and Charles Fox’s relationship could not withstand the ideological chasm that emerged between them after the French Revolution. But they believed passionately in the importance of friendship....

Given that the most widely accepted date for the start of the Wars of the Roses is 1455, it is unsurprising that the military defeats and collapse of active kingship in 1453-54 are often cited as causes...

Trying to psychoanalyse historical figures is rarely productive, but Cicero was a type we can all recognise. He had a huge but exceedingly brittle ego which could seesaw from self-regard to self-loathing,...