The notion of the tattoo as something concealed – waiting to be uncovered – lends it an erotic quality. The association with secrecy helps to explain why tattooing became linked with queer communities...
Many Chinchorro remains have fractures to the arms and legs, most likely from slipping on wet rocks. Looking down the slope, I could see how such accidents happened. And yet, for all the challenges of...
Unlike the usual debates over emancipation, which discussed barring formerly enslaved persons from land ownership, Robert Wedderburn argued that true freedom was possible only if land were handed over...
The environmental history of European empire doesn’t end with decolonisation. The quasi-colonial schemes of the Green Revolution were as consequential ecologically as the infrastructure projects that...
Historians who address such topics as extinction, which straddle the history of humans and of the Earth, face the additional challenge of scale: the mismatch between our decades and centuries and the Earth’s...
Pico’s Oration contravenes the very idea of human possibility that we think the Renaissance is about – yet we think of the Renaissance this way partly because of a centuries-long misreading of it....
Cotton Nero A.x is a small miracle: a quarto volume, about the size of a paperback, consisting of just 92 leaves. It contains four untitled English poems – 20th-century editors named them Pearl, Cleanness,...
Starting out on his quest into his family history, Joe Dunthorne doesn’t know what to ask his grandmother about the experience of Jewish families such as theirs in Hitler’s Germany. She tells him to...
After the war the Nazis’ eugenic policies continued to be implicitly or even explicitly condoned in West Germany. Courts accepted the excuse given by doctors accused of murdering the disabled that they...
Seas are repetitive creatures, working in cycles of tides, migration and climate change, which is normally to say the waxing and waning of the Ice Age. It is the coast that creates the past. The ancients...
The rarity of phosphorus makes it the single most limiting factor for the growth of biomass on Earth. It is, as Isaac Asimov puts it, ‘life’s bottleneck’ – the toll which must be paid by all matter...
The library made possible a new kind of intellectual life. Machiavelli, when he’d been exiled from Florence, described a later version of this life in a splendidly ironic letter to Francesco Vettori:...
The English republic isn’t recalled with much fondness by anyone. It is known as a fun-sapping entity that cancelled Christmas and banned the theatre. To royalists and conservatives it will for ever...
While they may have converted out of fear for their lives, many New Christians were eager to integrate into mainstream Christian society. They joined religious orders, sponsored family chapels in churches...
Now that the war is so long ago, the subject of Nazi exiles in South America can seem a stale, even dubious preoccupation. The fact that fiercely anti-communist South American dictatorships allowed Germans...
Gulbadan Begum was the daughter of the founder of the Mughal Empire. She is the only Mughal woman known to have written an imperial history. Conditions in the Age of Emperor Humayun was composed when she...
It would be tempting to repeat the salacious stories told about Augustus the Strong, but Tim Blanning has instead produced an authoritative account of his reign and a measured reckoning of what Augustus...
In 1943, the Allies founded the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration to care for civilians and the displaced and to help military authorities get them back ‘home’. Very quickly...