Execution
At last we see Henry VIII’s wives as individuals
Specialist knowledge of Tudor portraiture, book bindings, music and jewellery enables us to see each woman anew, possessed of a distinct life and afterlife
Sir Roger Casement never deserved to hang
Executed as one of the leaders of the Easter Rising, he was absent from Dublin at the time of the doomed insurrection – and actually tried to prevent it
Victims of a cruel prejudice: the last two men to be executed for sodomy in England
Chris Bryant describes in painful detail how James Pratt and John Smith, working-class men from the Midlands, fell foul of the ‘bloodthirsty English justice system’ in 1835
The men of blood get their comeuppance in Revolutionary France
Colin Jones’s hour-by-hour reconstruction of the fall of Maximilien Robespierre, the French revolutionary most associated with the Terror, is inspired…
From head-shrinking to skull-seeking: a history of the severed head
A severed head, argues Frances Larson in her sprightly new book, is ‘simultaneously a person and a thing… an apparently…
Terrorists still can't 'execute' anyone
During the sudden advances of ISIS in Iraq, one visual image stood for their brutality. As the Daily Mail reported…
