How the Rillington Place murders turned Britain into a nation of ghouls
With titillating newspaper coverage making John Christie’s trial a hot ticket, everyone seemed to want to peep behind the curtains of the house of horror – or even break in
Another mistress for Victor Hugo: Célina, by Catherine Axelrad, reviewed
A young chambermaid joins the Hugo household in Guernsey and soon finds herself summoned at night to her master’s adjoining bedroom
Sisterly duty: The Painter’s Daughters, by Emily Howes, reviewed
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
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
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
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
‘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
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
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
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?
It must be rare for a popular song to have such a lasting influence on a posthumous reputation. However, this…
Celebrating the 1918 Armistice resulted in thousands more deaths
Reflecting on the scenes of celebration, the ‘overpowering entrancements’, that he had witnessed in November 1918 on the first Armistice…
Was Ada Lovelace the true founder of Silicon Valley?
It’s more than 160 years since the death of the computer pioneer Ada Lovelace, Charles Babbage’s ‘enchantress of numbers’ and…
The great betrayal
They were at sea for more than two months in desperately cramped conditions. The battered ship, barely seaworthy, pitched violently…
Embarrassing Victorian bodies
The fetishisation of the Victorians shows no sign of abating. Over the past 16 years, since the centenary of the…
