There’s a voyeuristic quality to so many of the discussions of Anne’s rise and fall, since it was allegedly her sexual allure that made her queen and her sexual licence that led to her death. The compulsion...
Moving the Sanskrit epics ‘from mythology to history’ turns out to mean the obliteration of an archaeological site by a construction site. This is the kind of historical reckoning which India’s present...
The Sumerian priestess Enheduana managed the complex affairs of the temple and wrote poems, among them a collection of temple hymns that sought to accomplish in verse what her father, Sargon of Akkad,...
I know a good deal about the Bonhomme Richard. I know that it was originally a French merchant vessel called the Duc de Duras; that it was loaned to the fledgling US navy; and that it took part in the...
Like sculptures, fossils need curators. A raw lump of stone must be prepared and cleaned before it can be studied as a fossil; scientists of the past may well have inadvertently destroyed interesting surface...
Apart from getting rid of the Bolsheviks, the aims of the Western intervention were remarkably ill-defined. Sometimes it was to protect British interests and keep the Germans, Turks, Poles, or Japanese...
Contrary to the myth that from itsa founding document America was dedicated to capitalism, private property and the personal accumulation of wealth, ‘happiness’ in its 18th-century definition meant...
You can’t buy what Edinburgh has. You can, however, rent out certain kinds of access to it. This, as David Harvey writes, is a recipe for self-destruction. The influx of international capital produces...
The Chinchorro culture began mummifying their dead in what is now southern Peru and northern Chile around 6000 BCE, making South America’s earliest mummified bodies two thousand years older than those...
The awesomeness of 1789 as a model of human emancipation inspired revolutionaries of various kinds – liberal, socialist, anticolonialist – worldwide until at least the mid-20th century. Only the Anglo-American...
The Hundred Years War created a sense of nationhood, especially in France. In England, the Anglo-Norman dialect died out, and though French was still part of the equipment of ladies and gentlemen, it was...
Israel’s security is Germany’s Staatsräson, as Angela Merkel put it in 2008. Solidarity with the Jewish state has burnished Germany’s proud self-image as the only country that makes public remembrance...
In Indigenous Mesoamerica and Greater Amazonia, feeding someone – whether human or animal – expressed a duty of care. Once tamed, animals lived alongside humans in companionable relationships. The...
Perhaps the greatest shame of the Atlantic slave trade was that it inspired no shame at all. In their own time, Britain’s slave traders were men of distinction: ‘worthy men, fathers of families and...
In his twenties and thirties, Aldus Manutius was an ordinary humanist. But then, at forty, he moved to Venice and reinvented himself as a publisher. Why did he do it? How did he become a printer so ambitious...
It would be decades before younger Germans emerged from the national solipsism of their parents and recognised the suffering wreaked by German fascism on other peoples. When they did so, not least through...
Nowadays, if this prodigy of wickedness is remembered at all, it is for an Alma-Tadema painting showing the emperor smothering his guests in a shower of roses. Polite society no longer tolerates the Orientalist...
For the 13th-century Muslim scholar Zakariyya al-Qazwini and his contemporaries, to contemplate the wonders of nature was to contemplate the majesty of God, so much so that cosmography was a mainstay of...