History & Classics

Velázquez’s portraits give us a more penetrating understanding of the image that the Spanish monarchy wished to convey than any textual description supplied by accounts or pamphlets. The portraits reveal...

The story begins in 324 CE, when the emperor Constantine broke ground for a new city on the Bosphorus, on the site of the ancient polis of Byzantion. Notwithstanding later legend, this was not a Christian...

Fools – men and women from incongruous, humble backgrounds – were dropped into the grand settings of Whitehall or Hampton Court to see what would happen. Their ‘naturalness’, or ignorance of convention...

The French Revolution soon turned into a rout of women’s rights. In 1804, the Napoleonic Code reaffirmed a husband’s authority over his wife and the Bourbon Restoration rescinded the right to divorce...

Myths that sought to explain American history and chart a path to the future once helped to bind the country together. Today, they are absorbed into the culture wars, reflecting divergent understandings...

Adorno’s aesthetics are extreme. ‘He is an easy man to caricature,’ Ben Watson writes, ‘because he believed in exaggeration as a means of telling the truth.’ He is frequently, and rightly, upbraided...

After its fall, outsiders speculated that the Cuban regime would collapse and the island would transition, quickly or slowly, to capitalism. But then interested countries have always persuaded themselves...

Historians argue that the Venetian ghetto was both an open-air prison and a bright spot in the darkness of early modern European antisemitism. The government confined Jews to a ghetto, but did not expel...

Minstrels provided art as entertainment, but also, in a time before the mechanical production and reproduction of sound, laboured to make a wide range of noises appropriate for various occasions.

The legiones were open only (with rare exceptions) to citizens; non-citizens had to join the less well paid, less prestigious auxilia, and were rewarded on retirement after 25 years’ service (assuming...

Raphael Samuel​ set out his stall as a practitioner of ‘people’s history’. This was a capacious category: it could be liberal, radical, nationalist or socialist; macro or microhistorical.

The unmistakable – and powerful – stereotype of the ‘good Italian’ permeates the perception of Italian behaviour in the 20th century, especially in wartime, both within and outside Italy.

Maldoror honoured independence struggles in Africa and other parts of the world throughout her life. But she wouldn’t set aside her values as a filmmaker in the name of a cause: ways of seeing had to...

The captain of HMS Wager had shot dead an unarmed sailor. Other men had been found murdered. The captain had been imprisoned by his own marines, and then left behind on the island by most of the crew....

Though people like Vasily Vereshchagin often castigated the British for the arrogance and cruelty of their brand of imperialism, in practice the Russians were no better. Clichés such as Russia being ‘between...

In an environment in which binary thinking prevailed, atheism was a potent ‘other’ against which devout Christianity defined itself. At its most extreme, this line of interpretation has led to the...

Whenever I read claims about ‘forgotten women’, I want to ask: ‘By whom?’ Feminists? Society? The ‘culture’? And why ‘forgotten’? Forgetting presupposes something once known, but the general...

Routinely sewn into male but not into female clothing, they have helped men make their way through the world, fully equipped, as if they were armoured vehicles or portable garden sheds.