‘This is much more than the history of a place’ Erik Linstrum is Professor of History at the University of Virginia Sam Wetherell’s Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain (Head of Zeus) is a mesmerising panorama of the postwar, postimperial, …
In the archive of Carl Hagenbeck’s Tierpark (Animal Park), which opened in Hamburg in 1907, there is a remarkable photograph of a few thousand tortoises in two large pens. They were not an exhibit, but they give us a glimpse …
Heiresses, as Miranda Kaufmann admits, is indebted to scholarship which has revealed, over many decades, the extent of the ties between the British establishment and Caribbean slavery. Founded in 2009, UCL’s Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British …
In May 2025 Keir Starmer, a prime minister with one of the largest majorities in history, backtracked on proposals to means-test the winter fuel allowance which has been paid to pensioners every year since 1997. There was a good case …
An unprecedented number of pilgrims travelled to Rome for the last two jubilees of the 16th century. Held every 25 years, jubilees were a rare opportunity for the faithful to earn plenary indulgences that absolved them from the ‘temporal punishment’ …
Prewar Britain was dependent on imported food; in 1938, 70 per cent of the cash value of the food consumed in Britain originated from overseas. For planners in the Ministry of Agriculture the solution was clear, and a campaign was …
In popular history, there are few more challenging subjects than the supernatural and religious beliefs of the past. Even the most open-minded modern historian or reader of history can struggle as we try to engage with unfamiliar thought-worlds, or cultures …
The path leading from Edmond Halley’s writings on magnetism to UFOs under Brazil is as convoluted as you might expect. Nonetheless, it was Halley – best known for using Newtonian mechanics to predict the return of the comet now bearing …
On a bleak morning in January 1918 one of the oddest military formations ever put into the field by imperial Britain set out from Khanaqin, in what is now Iraq, to cross the border into Persia. ‘Dunsterforce’, as it was …
On 21 March 1776 the popular politician John Wilkes (1725-97) rose in a packed House of Commons to speak in favour of parliamentary reform. The franchise, he argued, was hopelessly out of date, with the state of representation in the …
