Do you know what happened in Lyon in AD 177? Or in Milan in 1300? Or in Baroda in 1825? You probably don’t, but you shouldn’t worry: few do. Whatever happened, it was, by ordinary standards, something ...

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more. Although a pioneering physicist and mathematician, Blaise Pascal made it his mission to identify the divine ...

In 1843, two years before her death at the age of seventy-two, Cassandra Austen told her brother Charles that she had been ‘looking over & destroying some of my Papers’, but was keeping ‘a few letters ...

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more. Although a pioneering physicist and mathematician, Blaise Pascal made it his mission to identify the divine ...

The Western Isles are often shrunk from the scale afforded the mainland of Britain so as to fit onto a page of an atlas. Love of Country should serve to restore spaciousness, air and attention to this ...

With close to five hundred records relating to his life surviving and the prospect of still more being found, Geoffrey Chaucer remains one of the best-documented premodern Britons. The commanding size ...

UNLIKE HITLER OR Stalin, of whom there are any number of decent modern biographies, Mussolini still seems ill-served by historians, at least those writing in English. A couple of years ago the ...

Rachel Hewitt’s first book, Map of a Nation, showed how the institution that created our Ordnance Survey Landranger maps also shaped the United Kingdom. Her new book is similarly ambitious, setting ...

Sylvia Townsend Warner declined to write an autobiography on the grounds that she was ‘too imaginative’. She liked to make a distinction between her self as a person and as an artist; the Sylvia self ...

Those of us who write or teach about the English Reformation have for some years now been wrestling with a problem variously termed the ‘revisionist dilemma’ or the ‘compliance conundrum’. Basically, ...

The central action of Wendy Moore’s startlingly curious book takes place over a single year at the beginning of the reign of Queen Victoria. As a contemporary journalist put it, ‘There is no chapter ...

The title of A New Literary History of America is misleading, as Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors virtually admit in their introduction. ‘A literary history of America?’ they ask, and then go on to ...