Malcolm Gaskill

Teresa of Ávila​ was a late starter, but that was no bad thing for a paragon of piety. A perplexed or misspent adolescence emphasised the transforming power of grace in both Catholic hagiography and puritan conversion narratives. She was born into a Castilian merchant family in 1515, but her fortunes were compromised by her family’s dubious status. Her converso grandfather was...

Cambridge​ in the autumn of 1989 seemed to me a lonely place. I had just taken up that loneliest of occupations, doctoral research in the humanities: three years of self-exile in libraries and archives, hard-up and haunted by doubt. My girlfriend had gone to study in Russia, and I’d never felt more isolated or adrift. Every morning I’d cycle to my college and sit in the ancient...

Ortona,​ Christmas Eve, 1943. A thriving Adriatic port only days previously, it now lay in ruins. The population of ten thousand was gone. In their place were two battalions of elite Fallschirmjäger – German paratroopers – defending what was left of the town, and the 1st Canadian Infantry Division, who were under orders to take it. There would be no festive truce. Allied...

In June​ 1616 the Virginian princess Pocahontas arrived in Plymouth and travelled to London. With her came her husband, the English tobacco planter John Rolfe, and several members of her Native American family. Done up in embroidered silks and Flemish lace, she enjoyed – if that’s the right word – the adulation of the crowds and an audience with James I. She was not, in...

Few men wanted to fire the first shot or even pick a side, still less leave their glowing hearths to go campaigning. One can imagine the mood of the gardener who stopped writing about tulips in his notebook and began a new section headed: ‘The Postures of the Musket’. And when the gardeners and grocers, cobblers and carpenters did pick sides they couldn’t always say why.