History & Classics

Intelligence – whether rumour, gossip, hearsay or clandestine leaks – was central to ambassadorial activity. Henry Wotton’s unusual status as a resident Protestant ambassador in a Catholic state...

In early modern Europe, news took many forms. It could be words exchanged by the people who haunted Venice’s Rialto. You might hear news in a barbershop, a pharmacy or a London coffee house; out in the...

The absence of critical or fresh perspectives on Egyptology and its history, or any of the decolonial approaches that are debated by archaeologists and Egyptologists today, subverts any claims for restitution....

Suetonius, writing in the early second century, is notorious for the salacious details he shared of the depraved sex lives and sadistic murder sprees of the early Roman emperors, but there’s more to...

Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, better known as El Cid, cultivated his own personal army, made up of both Christians and Muslims, rewarding their loyalty with the spoils of plunder. How did a warlord who pillaged...

Edmund Burke and Charles Fox’s relationship could not withstand the ideological chasm that emerged between them after the French Revolution. But they believed passionately in the importance of friendship....

Given that the most widely accepted date for the start of the Wars of the Roses is 1455, it is unsurprising that the military defeats and collapse of active kingship in 1453-54 are often cited as causes...

Trying to psychoanalyse historical figures is rarely productive, but Cicero was a type we can all recognise. He had a huge but exceedingly brittle ego which could seesaw from self-regard to self-loathing,...

To read The Palestinians nearly half a century later is to recognise that the many defeats the Palestinian population had already endured, along with those of their unreliable Arab friends in three humiliating...

What must it have been like to live cheek by jowl with the man you’d cuckolded? In the early 19th century, for a woman’s cavalier servente to occupy the same household as her husband was not uncommon,...

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...

Lippmann was called the greatest journalist of his age, but his claims as an original thinker rest on his book Public Opinion, published in 1922. The book posits that modern man responds not to accuracy...

Above all, Jackson presents James as a ‘king of words’. No king before or since has written so thoughtfully about the nature of kingship. His ‘manual on kingcraft’, Basilikon Doron (‘The King’s...

The life of the tenth Ottoman sultan, Suleyman, known in Europe as the Magnificent and in Turkey as the Lawgiver, has the trappings of a Greek tragedy or a soap opera. There is murder, sex, duplicity...

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...