What was revolutionary about the French Revolution? Contemporary critics such as Edmund Burke lamented that France’s tyro politicians had squandered a golden opportunity to renew with a useable past. Had they found nothing to salvage from their own traditions, he …

The 50th anniversary of women’s suffrage in 1968 prompted a moment of soul searching for many women frustrated at how little progress seemed to have been made towards equality. One of these was Joyce Butler, the backbench Labour and Co-operative …

Idi Amin is often considered Africa’s most notorious postcolonial dictator. Around the time of his government’s fall in 1979, dozens of accounts and biographies emerged, each telling horrific stories of brutality. Henry Kyemba, a former minister in Amin’s government, published …

If you haven’t yet read the History Today Books of the Year Part 1, you can find it here. ‘An exploration of issues relevant to anyone interested in the practice of history’ George Bodie Lecturer in History at Goldsmiths, University …

Read this book’s title, and you might guess that David Hempton – perhaps the world’s greatest historian of Methodism – has written a textbook: a survey of Christianity across the past five centuries. Read it again, and you might imagine …

‘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’ …