History & Classics

It can be hard​ to imagine a world in which people justified slavery, yet for most of recorded history enslavement met with little intellectual opposition. Seneca was a rare dissenter. In his 47th...

Hegelians will admire the encapsulation of the era’s contradictions in a single individual. Most of us will be puzzled by his fickleness. Louis Bonaparte’s personal life reinforces the sense...

Olives didn’t take; the wine wasn’t as good as it was back home. Other industry remained limited. Despite building cities, roads, ports and villas that surpassed anything constructed in the...

The spirit of modernity would influence zoos for generations. Dialogue between reformed conceptions of society and the zoo energised a mutually sustaining ideology. It was no longer acceptable for the...

It is hard to imagine any other painter or sculptor, living or dead, ever attracting this kind of attention, but it is equally hard to attribute it to Leonardo’s artistic talent, especially as he...

In 2014, Hindu nationalists won the general election in India: power was now held by admirers of Savarkar, who had been tried as an accomplice to Gandhi’s assassination, and of Nathuram Godse, who...

The representation of Odysseus as a reluctant warlord makes a nonsense of The Odyssey’s imagined world. We are not shown that war or killing are bad, only that good men sometimes feel bad about...

Over the past two generations, the boundaries of the classical world have been stretched to the steppe frontier of China, the coasts of Kerala and Sri Lanka, the Gulf of Aden and Ethiopia. But Scandinavia...

One​ morning in October 1552, Felix Platter left his hometown of Basel for Montpellier, where he was to study medicine. He was fifteen years old. Things started to happen to him, and he wrote them...

Between 4 and 12 May 1926, nearly three million workers – 20 per cent of the adult population – downed tools, and 162 million working days were lost. The British trade union movement was the...

As a British wartime child living near secret things and sites, I can remember easily respecting the instruction: ‘Just forget you saw that!’ But years later in Germany, I learned how often...

In accepting Catholic authority, writers unleashed their imaginations. As Graham Greene said, quoting Saki, ‘When once you have taken the Impossible into your calculations, its possibilities become...

Beyond the violence and immediacy of his language, perhaps Jean-Paul Marat was popular for a more straightforward reason: he gave his readers a plausible and often far-sighted account of what they were...

The ‘incredible iridescence’ of American feathered headdresses, artworks, shields and wall hangings attracted Jacobean collectors. In early modern England, ‘people were surrounded by...

Despite not securing the succession, despite being Catholic, Catherine, queen of Great Britain from 1662 until Charles’s death in 1685, managed to be perceived as an ideal consort. Royal wives were...

Political uncertainty and the problem of communicating at a distance, especially between Jacobites in Britain and the exiled Stuart court on the Continent, supplied opportunities for amphibious behaviours...

In Milan, Augustine, like colonial Australians or New Zealanders returning ‘home’ to London, experienced a social slippage. In Africa, Augustine had felt very Roman. In Italy, he was made...

Dror Wahrman argues that ‘it is hard to overestimate – though easy to forget – the cultural significance of the masquerade.’ Devotees of Bridgerton might quibble with ‘easy...