‘Demo-cracy’: power/might of the demos. ‘Demo-sthenes’: strength to/for/with the demos. Demosthenes’ father may have been unimaginative – he had himself been named ‘Demosthenes’ – but like the famous Pericles, father of the homonymous younger Pericles, he knew what he was …

In 1650 the physician Thomas Willis was called to the Falkam household in Oxfordshire on an urgent call. Mrs Falkam, a ‘woman of good family, aged about 20’, was six months pregnant when she ‘fell into an exquisite tertian fever’. …

Four feet long and made of plaster, a lifelike model of Diplodocus carnegii lurks atop one of the cabinets in the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences in Cambridge. But the countless millions who have seen ‘Dippy’ the dinosaur – whether …

When Indonesia’s former president Suharto died aged 86 in 2008, the nation began a week of mourning and conflicted reflection. It was, wrote the Jakarta Post, the end of a ‘remarkable life’; it was also, it hoped, the end of …

When Indonesia’s former president Suharto died aged 86 in 2008, the nation began a week of mourning and conflicted reflection. It was, wrote the Jakarta Post, the end of a ‘remarkable life’; it was also, it hoped, the end of …

In the summer of 1967 thousands of young people descended on San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district in search of sex, drugs, and transcendence. For many the ‘Summer of Love’ symbolised liberation from conformity and repression. But to Kent Philpott, a young …

The January 2026 issue marks the 75th anniversary of History Today’s first publication in January 1951. In a 1986 profile, the Guardian noted that ‘few magazines can have been launched with a more silvery spoon’ – a fair judgement: History …

People have never liked lectures from know-it-alls. When the Roman authorities handed over the Christian grammarian Cassian of Imola to his pagan pupils for punishment, they stabbed him to death with the pens they had used in his classes. Arnoud …

The prominence of the Dutch in global trade, combined with the industry of their press, made the 18th-century Dutch Republic an unrivalled news hub. Ambassadors and unofficial agents acting for foreign governments or for themselves descended on the Netherlands to …

In 2019 I travelled to Caen in Normandy to visit the Abbey of Holy Trinity and accidentally attended a baptism. The church was built by Queen Mathilda of Flanders in 1066, the same year her husband, Duke William, successfully subjugated …