Malcolm Gaskill

The modern zoo​ is nearly two centuries old. The zoological gardens in Regent’s Park were established in 1828 by the inventor Humphry Davy and the colonial adventurer Stamford Raffles, founder of modern Singapore. It was a fitting collaboration: encompassing the globe and studying its minutiae were different aspects of the same imperial ambition. Chartered by George IV, London Zoo...

Released​ in 1945, Dead of Night is the most imaginative British horror film of the postwar era. It was produced by Ealing Studios and pioneered the anthology format, much imitated in subsequent decades. The film fits five ghost stories from four directors into a framework that gathers its own supernatural momentum. It’s only when Walter Craig, played by Mervyn Johns, pulls up...

In the autumn​ of 2013, archaeologists digging beneath the chancel of a ruined church in Jamestown, Virginia, discovered four graves. They belonged to some of the earliest inhabitants of England’s first permanent colony in America. One was for Ferdinando Wainman, a member of the Virginia Governor’s Council; another for Robert Hunt, the church’s first minister and chaplain...

There’s​ a scene in Joe Dunthorne’s novel Submarine in which Oliver, the teenage protagonist, is served carrots so overcooked they look ‘out of focus’. It’s a joke repurposed in Children of Radium to describe Dunthorne’s acerbic grandmother’s ‘fuzzy’ woollen jumper. Here, though, the blurring effect becomes a metaphor for our misty view...

In​ 1524, astrologers warned of calamity in southern Germany: floods and failed harvests, sickness and war. The clergy would ‘drink the cup of bitterness’. But peasant disquiet was sufficiently visible to make planetary auguries redundant. When the serfs of Stühlingen rose up at midsummer, the catalyst was mundane: the countess of Lupfen had made them collect snail shells...