Holding a coin that someone else held two thousand years ago creates a special feeling of connectedness. Anyone who has handed a bag of cheap Roman bronzes around a room of bored undergraduates will have...
In ancient Egyptian culture, images and words were in a state of constant oscillation between letters, sounds and things. Hieroglyphic letters require as much typographical standardisation as the letters...
For British nationalists and imperialists, it has always been uncomfortable to think of Roman London as a medium-sized provincial capital on the periphery of someone else’s empire. It’s even worse...
Neither Alexander nor his generals could have imagined how spectacularly their publicity efforts would succeed. Over the decades and centuries that followed, his legend grew and ramified across the ancient...
Then as now, taxes on alcohol were an important source of government revenue. Many sultans found themselves torn between the ideal of dry streets and financial reality. Darkness helped them square the...
Bruno Latour tried to make the procedures of the hard sciences intelligible to scientists themselves and to the rest of us, though he worried that he could have done more to stand up for the accuracy of...
Stumbling out of the pouring rain on the Isle of Skye, James Boswell and Samuel Johnson found a welcome in the house of Allan MacDonald at Kingsburgh. Dr Johnson had developed a nasty cold;...
The death early in 1603 of Maria of Austria, daughter of Charles V, wife of Maximilian II and mother of Rudolf II, called for extravagant exequies. Her catafalque, erected in the monastery of...
His interest in alchemy was the chief reason that his canonisation was so long delayed: it inspired a rich store of legends about his astonishing feats of magic. As the medievalist David Collins asked,...
Act of Oblivion, the title of Robert Harris’s novel, refers to the Act of Free and General Pardon, Indemnity and Oblivion, introduced to the Convention Parliament in May 1660 and given royal assent on...
Calvin denounced the idea that the seven-day week was divinely ordained as ‘crass and carnal Sabbatarian superstition’. Why then do we use this odd system to cut the year into its smallest units? More...
The problem is not that we need to look elsewhere to find the true leaders of the February Revolution of 1848. It is rather that there were no leaders. For many years, the police authorities in Paris and...
Nature, witches and matriarchy formed a complex of which many disapproved, and it was pushed into remote places. Who knew what those peasants were doing in the dark?
The many things that filled houses in the later Middle Ages made for much heavier work: finer foods were cooked by more complex means; an ever expanding array of napkins had to be washed and arranged;...
The idea that London started to ‘swing’ in the 1960s was largely the concoction of journalists in need of a story, most of them American. But in Soho and on the King’s Road in Chelsea, ideas were...
For the Roman senatorial elite, networks of knowledge production were also social networks. They read each other’s work, lent each other books and discussed philological and philosophical matters. Caesar...
Poring over family stories to give meaning to our lives is something most of us do. For the descendants of people who have survived traumatic historical events, it takes on an added intensity – and,...
Toy theatres reproduced specific productions, but the early ones required considerable imagination on the part of the purchaser. They offered an unadapted play text, a selection of scenes and some, but...