The poet and the polymath: two 16th-century Portuguese travellers
In 1866, Dante Gabriel Rossetti visited a London print shop to buy a large canvas of a Renaissance street. He…
How Charles II sought to obliterate a decade of British history
When the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy, in the person of that ‘lovely black boy’ Charles II, was announced in…
Was Josiah Wedgwood really a radical?
No wonder Josiah Wedgwood, the 18th-century master potter, was a darling of the Victorians. From W.E. Gladstone to Samuel Smiles…
John Lilburne: champion of liberty and born belligerent
John Lilburne was only 43 when he died in 1657, an early death even for the time. But in many…
The Easter Rising’s road to hell — paved with good intentions
While reading this book in a London café, I was politely buttonholed by an Irishman: ‘Sorry to disturb you, but…
The Peasants’ Revolt — such a thrilling moment in English history — has eluded novelists in the past
Considering that it was, as Melvyn Bragg rightly puts it, ‘the biggest popular uprising ever experienced in England’, the Peasants’…
