History & Classics

The English republic isn’t recalled with much fondness by anyone. It is known as a fun-sapping entity that cancelled Christmas and banned the theatre. To royalists and conservatives it will for ever...

Gulbadan Begum was the daughter of the founder of the Mughal Empire. She is the only Mughal woman known to have written an imperial history. Conditions in the Age of Emperor Humayun was composed when she...

It would be tempting to repeat the salacious stories told about Augustus the Strong, but Tim Blanning has instead produced an authoritative account of his reign and a measured reckoning of what Augustus...

In 1943, the Allies founded the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration to care for civilians and the displaced and to help military authorities get them back ‘home’. Very quickly...

How can we account for France’s historical wavering on race, between an extraordinary openness to assimilation and outbursts of unashamed racism? French revolutionaries held such extreme views, William...

Crippen may be the name forever associated with the ‘North London cellar murder’, but in Hallie Rubenhold’s book he is treated as one character in ‘an ensemble cast brought together to tell a more...

Cannae made Hannibal more than just another name in the endless list of Rome’s enemies, but the elephants helped too. Twenty of them marched from Spain to Italy with Hannibal and his enormous army in...

Even if they had been appeasers, most Conservatives accepted the patriotic necessity of the war, but had many different ideas about what its outcome should be, some as optimistic as any socialist dreams...

It’s​ puzzling, unsettling even, to see ‘free speech’ rearing its head in public debate again, rousing passions which seemed long defunct. Wasn’t the doctrine definitively trumpeted by Milton...

The West Saxons may have promoted their version of the national story more successfully than the Mercians, but it is salutary to remember that if things had gone differently, the capital of England might...

The queer topography of London emerges in these books like a heat map, flaring in patches round the edges at Shepherd’s Bush Green or Clapham Common, where activity concentrates at night around public...

The British aversion to touching wasn’t limited to the Victorian era: comparative studies confirm that we continue to be more selective about when and where we are touched than people from other countries....

Whereas Isaiah Berlin saw no necessary connection between liberty and democracy, Quentin Skinner argues that representative democracy is the only form of governance that can guarantee liberty as independence:...

The pyramids are so central to the modern view of Egypt, and to Egyptian tourism, that it is hard not to speak about them in clichés. Yet visiting them, one is reminded how mysterious and extraordinary...

In the 18th and 19th centuries, Britain and Russia did not seek to divide the world between them and very rarely pointed weapons at each other. More often they were allies, for fifteen years against Napoleon,...

In the interwar years, the emerging concern of this group of young students was Britain’s inconsistencies: the combination of racism and domination with a seeming commitment to enabling the student’s...

The German Peasants’ War was an expression of a novel political sensibility and has informed every major European insurrection since; it can’t be understood without considering the rebels’ inner...

The compass retains a sense of romance. It’s pleasingly approximate, twitchy and impulsive. It feels alive in a way that Google Maps does not, partly because it is a natural instrument, in the sense...