History & Classics

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 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:...

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...

While they may have converted out of fear for their lives, many New Christians were eager to integrate into mainstream Christian society. They joined religious orders, sponsored family chapels in churches...

Now that the war is so long ago, the subject of Nazi exiles in South America can seem a stale, even dubious preoccupation. The fact that fiercely anti-communist South American dictatorships allowed Germans...

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...