History & Classics

Crippen may be the name forever associated with the ‘North London cellar murder’, but in Hallie Rubenhold’s book he is treated as one character in ‘an ensemble cast brought together to tell a more...

Cannae made Hannibal more than just another name in the endless list of Rome’s enemies, but the elephants helped too. Twenty of them marched from Spain to Italy with Hannibal and his enormous army in...

It’s​ puzzling, unsettling even, to see ‘free speech’ rearing its head in public debate again, rousing passions which seemed long defunct. Wasn’t the doctrine definitively trumpeted by Milton...

The West Saxons may have promoted their version of the national story more successfully than the Mercians, but it is salutary to remember that if things had gone differently, the capital of England might...

The queer topography of London emerges in these books like a heat map, flaring in patches round the edges at Shepherd’s Bush Green or Clapham Common, where activity concentrates at night around public...

The British aversion to touching wasn’t limited to the Victorian era: comparative studies confirm that we continue to be more selective about when and where we are touched than people from other countries....

Whereas Isaiah Berlin saw no necessary connection between liberty and democracy, Quentin Skinner argues that representative democracy is the only form of governance that can guarantee liberty as independence:...

The pyramids are so central to the modern view of Egypt, and to Egyptian tourism, that it is hard not to speak about them in clichés. Yet visiting them, one is reminded how mysterious and extraordinary...

In the 18th and 19th centuries, Britain and Russia did not seek to divide the world between them and very rarely pointed weapons at each other. More often they were allies, for fifteen years against Napoleon,...

In the interwar years, the emerging concern of this group of young students was Britain’s inconsistencies: the combination of racism and domination with a seeming commitment to enabling the student’s...

The German Peasants’ War was an expression of a novel political sensibility and has informed every major European insurrection since; it can’t be understood without considering the rebels’ inner...

The compass retains a sense of romance. It’s pleasingly approximate, twitchy and impulsive. It feels alive in a way that Google Maps does not, partly because it is a natural instrument, in the sense...

We are so used to being photographed, at all times of day, in every stage and aspect of life, that it’s hard to imagine what it would be like to have your picture taken for the first time.  The apparent...

In 1949 – as hostilities between Stalin and Truman escalated – 319 pairs of women were regularly exchanging letters between the US and USSR. The pen-pal programme had its origins in wartime Moscow....

Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City, released at the end of 1945. The movie begins with a version of the disclaimer that is now so common: ‘The characters in this film, even though they are inspired...

In​ the late morning of 30 April 1980, I left my flat to walk across to the Iranian embassy on Princes Gate. As I walked, I didn’t at first notice that something odd was happening and that the police...

Where amid this turmoil does neoliberalism stand? In emergency conditions it has been forced to take measures – interventionist, statist and protectionist – that are anathema to its doctrine, yet without...

Crusius plundered contemporary travel accounts for information alongside chronicles and histories. He recognised the connections between Greeks and Ottomans, seeing them as part of a common tradition of...