Mark Bostridge

Sisterly duty: The Painter’s Daughters, by Emily Howes, reviewed

24 February 2024 9:00 am

In a celebrated portrait of his daughters, Thomas Gainsborough shows the older child protecting her sister from harm. The roles would be dramatically reversed in later life

The woman who set our country in a roar

9 September 2023 9:00 am

Such was the emotion Anne Boleyn inspired in Henry VIII. But before long that scalding love had turned to a brutalising hatred of his second wife, culminating in her bloody beheading

Nursing grievances in the Crimean War

4 February 2023 9:00 am

When Florence Nightingale was joined in Scutari by groups of volunteer nuns, tensions among them soon imperilled the entire female nursing experiment

The Bible exists in some 700 languages – so it still has a long way to go

26 November 2022 9:00 am

With 7,000 living languages now in the world, there are countless pitfalls for translators, as John Barton demonstrates

It is impossible to imagine Henrician England except through the eyes of Hans Holbein

8 May 2021 9:00 am

‘Holbein redeemed a whole era for us from oblivion,’ remarks the author of a trilogy of novels set at Henry…

Dark days for Britain: London, Burning, by Anthony Quinn, reviewed

17 April 2021 9:00 am

Not long ago, a group of psychologists analysing data about national happiness discovered that the British were at their unhappiest…

The inside story of working for Carmen Callil

14 March 2020 9:00 am

Forty-seven years ago, Virago paperbacks, with their stylish green spines and hint-of-the-transgressive colophons of a red apple with a bite…

My short, bitter-sweet marriage to the radical historian Raphael Samuel

2 November 2019 9:00 am

In a telling moment early on in A Radical Romance, Alison Light admits that she once identified with the character…

Alma Mahler — maddening, mesmerising or plain malicious?

8 June 2019 9:00 am

It must be rare for a popular song to have such a lasting influence on a posthumous reputation. However, this…

Members of the Women’s Royal Australian Naval Service (WRANS) celebrate Armistice Day, 1918 in London

Celebrating the 1918 Armistice resulted in thousands more deaths

10 November 2018 9:00 am

Reflecting on the scenes of celebration, the ‘overpowering entrancements’, that he had witnessed in November 1918 on the first Armistice…

Portrait of Ada, aged 20

Was Ada Lovelace the true founder of Silicon Valley?

17 March 2018 9:00 am

It’s more than 160 years since the death of the computer pioneer Ada Lovelace, Charles Babbage’s ‘enchantress of numbers’ and…

Author Nathan Englander (Photo: Getty)

The great betrayal

14 October 2017 9:00 am

They were at sea for more than two months in desperately cramped conditions. The battered ship, barely seaworthy, pitched violently…

Embarrassing Victorian bodies

21 January 2017 9:00 am

The fetishisation of the Victorians shows no sign of abating. Over the past 16 years, since the centenary of the…