Volume: 62 Issue: 12

Gillian Tindall reflects on a recent discovery by a Dickens scholar, which offers new insights into the great writer’s early years.

A great hoax was born on December 18th, 1912.

While it is right to seek justice for those tortured and mistreated during the Kenyan Emergency of the 1950s, attempts to portray the conflict as a Manichean one...

A selection of readers' correspondence with the editor, Paul Lay.

Erica Fudge and Richard Thomas explore relationships between people and domestic animals in early modern England and how new types of archaeological evidence are...

The great composer died on December 28th, 1937.

As the erotic novel appears to be experiencing a renaissance Julie Peakman reflects on 18th-century appetites for pornography.

Disabled people were prominent at the court of the Spanish Habsburgs. Janet Ravenscroft examines the roles they played and draws comparisons with modern attitudes...

Artemis Cooper reflects on Patrick Leigh Fermor’s flexible approach to historical fact.

Sarah Wise admires an assessment of lunacy in 19th-century London.

When Richard II succeeded his grandfather, Edward III, he turned to alchemy to create a more pious ideal of kingship. Though his reign ended in failure, it left us...

Geoffrey Best reflects on a lifetime collecting books and the difficulties – emotional and financial – of parting with them.

Roger Hudson sails past a half-built Battersea Power Station and on to its slow decline.

Chris Darnell examines the political and military background to the IRA’s last major action against the British army.

Enter our prize crossword and win the audiobook The Making of Modern Medicine.

A landmark in folklore was published on December 20th, 1812.

Helen Szamuely explores the unprecedented success of a household manual and cookery book produced by a Russian housewife, Yelena Molokhovets, following the...

Derek Wilson welcomes the emergence from the shadows of Thomas Cromwell, thanks to Hilary Mantel’s prize-winning historical novels.

After bringing slavery in the West Indies to an end in 1834, Britons differed over how to treat other forms of oppression around the world, says Richard Huzzey....

A critical history of cartography traverses a panorama from ancient Greece to Google Earth.

A new book attempts to answer the question: how did we reach our present state of collective knowledge?

What led people to go off into the forest, chop down a tree and decorate it?

The story of Simon de Montfort, Henry III and the Barons' War.

This month we have questions on Chilean history, the Divine Comedy and the Magna Carta.

An account of the Great War restores the primacy of the Balkans to the conflict's origins.