History & Classics

Alberti the writer, first and last, was Alberti the reader, whose attitude towards ancient (and later) texts was anything but passive. He grew up in an age of textual discoveries – the hunting and gathering...

The main application of gunpowder was inevitably in warfare, which has its own volatile story, but the enterprise of refining gunpowder for entertainment ran in parallel, and its history traces a long...

Belief in a multitude of non-human entities, and in the ability of humankind to forge relationships with them via magical words and images, appears to be almost universal – and wherever these beliefs...

For all of her self-interest and avarice, Madame Restell does seem to have had one great and almost unheard-of quality in a 19th-century abortionist: she did not make a habit of killing her clients. Restell...

The lands the Capetian kings controlled would eventually expand far beyond the family territory of the Île-de-France, to embrace the principalities and smaller counties that would eventually become France.

‘This history is to be told like a fable,’ Warburg explained of the sequences disclosed in the Bilderatlas panels, calling them ‘ghost stories for all adults’. There was no escape from the psychic...

Israel’s leaders claim this war is existential, a matter of Jewish survival, and there is a grain of truth in this claim, because the state is incapable of imagining Israeli Jewish existence except on...

‘He draws his rents from rage and pain,’ Emerson once wrote of ‘the writer’, but more narrowly of himself.

In its first three centuries Reichenau Abbey was one of the leading educational centres in Europe. Its abbots produced fine manuscripts for their own use and on commission. They were involved in Carolingian...

It becomes apparent from Owen’s graphic and appalled letters home that it was the urge to make his mother, in the first instance, see and feel what the Western Front was really like that drove him to...

In the guise of natural theology, Malthusian political economy soon became the common sense of a middle class brought up to see the world as fallen and life as a trial: scarcity was ordained by providence,...

Fanon’s world has a logic. His pages are full of identities, contradictions, Aufhebungen – master and slave, being and nothingness. Any biography, however, has to decide in the end which of the various...

Accounts of Elizabeth’s ‘nomination’ and James’s straightforward succession are ultimately misleading. Elizabeth’s refusal to make a will or leave directions for her funeral reinforces the impression...

One of the papyri excavated by the archaeologist Heba Adly contains 97 lines of two plays by Euripides – Ino and Polyidus – that were known to us only through scattered quotations and summaries...

Despite an explicit biblical prohibition on cross-dressing, reinforced by canon law, trans monks caught the imaginations of worshippers because they so fully embodied the ideal of ‘becoming male’,...

The department store is dying. It’s not the only building type to find itself marooned by social and economic change, but it is the youngest. Castles and churches, stately homes, factories and warehouses...

The wealth of India had been a legend in the Mediterranean since the fourth century BC, enhanced by Alexander the Great’s forays. India, not China, was Rome’s greatest trading partner. The sea was,...

Everywhere, it seems, human beings have believed that sexual desire must be curbed – it is ‘a source of conflict’, Maurice Godelier says, and ‘cannot be entirely left up to each individual’.