Tom Johnson

Adam Smith​ began his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by arguing that the division of labour was the key to the prosperity of advanced economies. It made the production of goods far more efficient, allowing the creation of cheap commodities that could be enjoyed by everyone. ‘The woollen coat,’ he writes, ‘which covers the day labourer, as...

At two o’clock​ in the morning on 23 October 1731, ‘a great smoak’ began to pour from the rafters of Ashburnham House in Westminster. The library was on fire, which meant that English history was on fire. Ashburnham held the many rare manuscripts that had been donated to the nation by the antiquarian Robert Cotton, as well as the treasures of the royal manuscript...

Edward​ III liked to dress up as a bird. In 1348, at a tournament in Bury St Edmunds, he revealed himself as a gleaming pheasant with copper-pipe wings and real feathers. The next year, celebrating Christmas with the archbishop of Canterbury, he wore a white buckram harness spangled with three hundred leaves of silver, adorned with one of his mottoes: ‘Hay hay the wythe swan/by godes...

It is​ an instructive irony of English political history that the Houses of Parliament were burned down not by revolutionaries but by bureaucrats. In 1834, John Phipps, an assistant surveyor for London in the Office of Woods and Forests, was tasked with finding more office space in the cluttered Exchequer buildings at Westminster. He discovered that a whole suite of rooms was being used for...

On​ 13 May 1397, the visitors came to Ruardean in Gloucestershire. They learned that Nicholas Cuthler was causing a scandal among his neighbours. He had not come to terms with his father’s death and was making strange claims: he went about in public saying that his father’s spirit still walked the village at night. One evening he even kept vigil beside the tomb from dusk till...