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...
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....
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....
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’,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...