Today's Featured Articles

Months Past

Premiere of The Great Dictator

Chaplin's celebrated film first appeared on 15 October 1940.

Richard Cavendish

Miscellanies

Name of Thrones

Royal naming strategies in medieval England.

Rachel Tod

Pacification with Maroons on the Island of Jamaica, by Agostino Runias (1728-96).
Review

The Long Fight for Liberty

Maroon freedom fighters on two Caribbean islands helped hasten the abolition of slavery.

David Lowenthal

From the Archive: Elizabethan Era

The Young John Dee

Elizabeth I’s court magician John Dee was also one of England’s most learned men

Katie Birkwood

Francis Drake, 1652. Courtesy University of California Libraries

Celebrity, Politics and Francis Drake

Drake’s exploits in the New World made him perfect material for the English gutter press.

Sara Bradley

St Margaret of York

The execution of Margaret Clitherow was considered gruesome, even by the standards of the time.

Peter Lake, Michael Questier

Miscellanies is our free weekly long read.
Sign up to our newsletter and get it in your inbox.

Homepage

Most Recent

Winfarthing pendant, early seventh century, found in a woman's grave in Norfolk, 2015.
Feature

Wynflæd’s Will

Often lost behind stories of kings, queens, bishops and saints, what was life like for an Anglo-Saxon woman below the upper ranks of society?

Lenin working in the Kremlin, 1918
Feature

Lenin: The Machiavellian Marxist

The leader of the Soviet Revolution was an armed prophet who adopted the characteristics of the lion and the fox.

View of Ancient Babylon, Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, 1721.
National Gallery

National Gallery: Tigris and Euphrates

The two rivers where civilisation began.

Emily Jones.
On The Spot

On The Spot: Emily Jones

‘Ideas don’t do things; people do.’

Miscellanies

The Women Who Walked Into History

Faced with a crisis in her personal life and an uncertain future, Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt found respite in long, arduous and often dangerous walks. Countless women have followed in her footsteps.

Mary Squires in a 19th-century engraving.
Review

Gypsies in England

A sympathetic narrative of a people integral to the national story.

Rise and fall: Cromwell Dissolving the Long Parliament, by Benjamin West (1782).
History Matters

The End of the English Republic

The English republic was brought down by the same forces that brought it to power.

Opium poppy, white flowers and seed capsule, about 1853, after Miss M.A. Burnett.
Review

A History of Opium

Opium has been known and used for more than 7,000 years. A brilliantly researched and wide-ranging study brings its history up to date.

Welcome

Current Issue

Volume 68 Issue 10 October 2018

  • Divided loyalties in Tudor England
  • Lord Liverpool, Eurosceptic
  • Recycling to win the Second World War
  • Mesopotamia: the land between two rivers
  • The end of the English republic
  • St George and the Dragon

Full Contents Subscribe