History & Classics

Although Ireland had endured earlier famines – including one in the 1740s that, proportionally, claimed more lives – the Great Famine remains a decisive turning point in Irish history. It came to be...

Emilio Silva set up the Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica to improve and formalise the process of recovering the desaparecidos, ‘the disappeared’. ‘That word was important...

We still live in the long shadow of Habsburg disintegration. In addition to the lingering legacy of 19th-century state formations, European and global politics are shaken by continuing reverberations in...

Liverpool’s explosive growth followed the construction of a deep-water port in 1715. Soon it was a centre of the British imperial maritime economy. But decline set in after the First World War. By the...

Along with their terminology, the Romans had passed down to early medieval Europe the belief that crowds were an important source of validation. Hordes of admirers attested to the holiness of relics. Adoring...

Saint or sinner, scholar or polemicist, philosopher or politician – no single vision of Thomas More has ever commanded popular assent. When Erasmus called him ‘a man for all seasons’, he was commending...

The notion of the tattoo as something concealed – waiting to be uncovered – lends it an erotic quality. The association with secrecy helps to explain why tattooing became linked with queer communities...

Many Chinchorro remains have fractures to the arms and legs, most likely from slipping on wet rocks. Looking down the slope, I could see how such accidents happened. And yet, for all the challenges of...

Unlike the usual debates over emancipation, which discussed barring formerly enslaved persons from land ownership, Robert Wedderburn argued that true freedom was possible only if land were handed over...

The environmental history of European empire doesn’t end with decolonisation. The quasi-colonial schemes of the Green Revolution were as consequential ecologically as the infrastructure projects that...

Historians who address such topics as extinction, which straddle the history of humans and of the Earth, face the additional challenge of scale: the mismatch between our decades and centuries and the Earth’s...

Pico’s Oration contravenes the very idea of human possibility that we think the Renaissance is about – yet we think of the Renaissance this way partly because of a centuries-long misreading of it....

Cotton Nero A.x is a small miracle: a quarto volume, about the size of a paperback, consisting of just 92 leaves. It contains four untitled English poems – 20th-century editors named them Pearl, Cleanness,...

Starting out on his quest into his family history, Joe Dunthorne doesn’t know what to ask his grandmother about the experience of Jewish families such as theirs in Hitler’s Germany. She tells him to...

After the war the Nazis’ eugenic policies continued to be implicitly or even explicitly condoned in West Germany. Courts accepted the excuse given by doctors accused of murdering the disabled that they...

Seas are repetitive creatures, working in cycles of tides, migration and climate change, which is normally to say the waxing and waning of the Ice Age. It is the coast that creates the past. The ancients...

The rarity of phosphorus makes it the single most limiting factor for the growth of biomass on Earth. It is, as Isaac Asimov puts it, ‘life’s bottleneck’ – the toll which must be paid by all matter...

The library made possible a new kind of intellectual life. Machiavelli, when he’d been exiled from Florence, described a later version of this life in a splendidly ironic letter to Francesco Vettori:...