Katrina Gulliver

When the local wizard was the repository of all wisdom

11 May 2024 9:00 am

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

4 November 2023 9:00 am

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?

19 August 2023 9:00 am

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

11 March 2023 9:00 am

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

26 March 2022 9:00 am

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?

15 January 2022 9:00 am

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

16 October 2021 9:00 am

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

5 December 2020 9:00 am

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

5 September 2020 9:00 am

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

11 April 2020 9:00 am

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

28 September 2019 9:00 am

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

6 July 2019 9:00 am

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

8 June 2019 9:00 am

‘Below the Forties there is no law, and below the Fifties there is no God.’ Most sailors know some version…

Detail of Miao embroidery from south-west China. Motifs, inspired by ancient Miao songs and legends, are handed down from generation to generation

Spinning yarns: uplifting stories told through needlework

2 February 2019 9:00 am

In this unusual book, part memoir, part history, Clare Hunter offers a personal meditation on the textile arts. Sewing and…

Silk-weaving in China. An illustration from a book on the silk industry. Chinese school, 19th century

Stitches in time: The history of the world through the eye of a needle

13 October 2018 9:00 am

I recently read a book in which the author, describing rural life in the early 19th century, casually mentioned clothing…

Campaigners protest against government plans to build huge new windfarms in Wales in 2011. Credit Getty Images

When trendy ideas capture the ruling elite, democracy can go hang

23 June 2018 9:00 am

If social media manipulation has influenced elections, and dark money has influenced our elected representatives, then we are already on…

Are the French right to be obsessed with their Gaulish ancestry?

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…

Did the modern world really begin in 1947?

2 December 2017 9:00 am

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

30 September 2017 9:00 am

Planning for the ‘war of the future’ is something generals and politicians have been doing for the past 150 years.…

The cornucopia of food advertised by the Empire Marketing Board, 1927‑1933

The fruits of imperialism

2 September 2017 9:00 am

Imagine yourself a middle-class person in England in the 1870s. You sit down to drink a cup of tea while…

‘The Arrival of the Pilgrims Fathers’, 1864, Antonio Gilbert (oil on canvas)

Crossing the pond

8 July 2017 9:00 am

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

22 April 2017 9:00 am

In the early 1920s, while the United States was entering its crazed phase of prohibition and prosperity, a group of…