When the local wizard was the repository of all wisdom
Before the arrival of ‘proper’ doctors, everyone in the Middle Ages, from rulers to peasants, turned to magic practitioners and cunning folk for healing and advice
Not everything in the garden is lovely
For as long as we have been human, powerful chemicals in plants have provided us with stimulants, analgesics – and the means of murder
Would we welcome bears in Britain again?
With rewilding projects multiplying worldwide, brown, black and grizzly bears are making a bold comeback. But how much bear can we bear?
Mass poisonings in a small town in Hungary
When a midwife in Nagyrév started doling out arsenic in 1911, dozens more women followed suit, until the death toll became impossible to ignore
Britain’s money laundering scandal goes back a long way
The war in Ukraine has turned a lot of people’s attention to oligarchs in the UK. How did these guys…
Should we blame our ancestors for slavery when we’re equally culpable?
The premise of White Debt is that the author’s ancestors ran a business selling a product grown by slaves. Therefore…
Don’t ask a historian what history is
E.H. Carr’s 1961 book What is History? has cast a long shadow over the discipline. I recall being assigned to…
The British Empire is now the subject on which the sun never sets
Wrestling with the history of the British Empire is the unfinished and unfinishable project of our history. Time’s Monster takes…
The South Sea Company’s bonds were never meant to be a scam
In Money for Nothing, Thomas Levenson brings us into the story of the South Sea Bubble by writing about the…
Globalisation is scarcely new: it dates back to the year 1000
In Japan, people thought the world would end in 1052. In the decades leading up to judgment day, Kyoto was…
How the Lyons Corner House became a haven for the single working woman
In Whitechapel, in the mid 19th century, rolling and selling cigars was a way for a newly arrived immigrant to…
From pets to pests: cats, rabbits and now raccoons
I was shocked some years ago to discover, as I scratched bites on my ankles on holiday on Maui, that…
The wildest waters in the world
‘Below the Forties there is no law, and below the Fifties there is no God.’ Most sailors know some version…
Spinning yarns: uplifting stories told through needlework
In this unusual book, part memoir, part history, Clare Hunter offers a personal meditation on the textile arts. Sewing and…
Stitches in time: The history of the world through the eye of a needle
I recently read a book in which the author, describing rural life in the early 19th century, casually mentioned clothing…
When trendy ideas capture the ruling elite, democracy can go hang
If social media manipulation has influenced elections, and dark money has influenced our elected representatives, then we are already on…
Did the modern world really begin in 1947?
I grew up knowing 1947 as the year of my father’s birth, in a black-and-white faraway time. I was told…
Ratings war
Planning for the ‘war of the future’ is something generals and politicians have been doing for the past 150 years.…
The fruits of imperialism
Imagine yourself a middle-class person in England in the 1870s. You sit down to drink a cup of tea while…
Crossing the pond
What led a person in 17th-century England to get on a ship bound for the Americas? James Evans attempts to…
Shame and scandal in the American west
In the early 1920s, while the United States was entering its crazed phase of prohibition and prosperity, a group of…
Are the French right to be obsessed with their Gaulish ancestry?
Katrina Gulliver 31 March 2018 9:00 am
This book reminded me of Kurt Andersen’s Fantasyland — but where Andersen thinks only Americans have lost their minds, David…