History & Classics

Pepys was a meticulous – some might say compulsive – record-keeper. Into his diary’s pages went social debts (who had given him dinner, who still owed him one), gossip, the music he heard and the...

She is​ the queen of excess, who teaches us the lessons of history with shepherdess costumes and lace ruffles. Marie-Antoinette, consort to Louis XVI of France, frolicked her way to revolution and death...

Readers familiar with the legend of Pocahontas – baptised an Anglican in the church at Jamestown – and the puritan folklore of Thanksgiving might be surprised by the existence of Catholic colonists:...

The Surrealists saw colonialism and imperialism as intrinsic to fascism, and from start to finish they campaigned against both, opposing the wars in Morocco in the 1920s and Algeria in the 1950s. ‘You...

After reading​ Geoff Browell and Eileen Chanin’s concise history of the Strand, you will never walk down that street again without thinking of the hippopotami that wallowed in a primeval swamp at the...

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...

Gutenberg remains unknowable: an implied but not a felt presence. This is true for all but a small number of 15th-century lives, of course, but it’s impossible to ignore the gulf between Gutenberg’s...

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....