Today’s featured articles
If the British Empire were to be saved, it would take a renewal of Britain’s youth. Robert Baden-Powell had the answer: self-reliance, patriotism and the Boy Scouts.
The ancient world found him to have achieved greatness and thrust it upon his name, but was the destruction of Babylon Cyrus’ divinely ordained destiny?
The Crusader state of Acre was the most cosmopolitan city in the medieval world. Its inhabitants thought it too valuable to destroy. They were wrong.
Most recent
Mental Health and the 17th-Century Ship’s Doctor
Life at sea was hard. An early modern ship’s surgeon had to treat not just broken bones but distress and trauma.
Charles de Gaulle is Sentenced to Death
Court-martialled in absentia on 2 August 1940, the Vichy regime confiscated de Gaulle’s property and condemned him to death.
Reduce and Seduce at the Teenage Beauty Farm
Malibu’s 1960s Beauty Farm aimed to get a new generation of teenagers marriage-ready
‘José Martí Reader: Writings on the Americas’ review
José Martí Reader: Writings on the Americas, edited by Deborah Shnookal and Mirta Muñiz, collects the works of Cuba's ‘Apostle of Independence’.
‘Saving’ South Africa’s San Peoples
By the early 20th century the indigenous San peoples of South Africa were deemed to be almost extinct. The arguments for their protection drew on colonial methods of wildlife preservation and reduced them to the status of an endangered species.
Shakespeare’s Lost Years
‘What’s past is prologue’ Shakespeare wrote – but so little is known of his own. There are plenty of theories, each as implausible as the next.
Ship Shape: British Naval Strategy After Napoleon
British military engagement in northwest Europe did not pause after Waterloo and resume in 1914. The intervening century saw fluctuations in French power – and the creation of a strategic system to control it.
‘Gods, Guns and Missionaries’ by Manu S. Pillai review
Hinduism predates colonialism by thousands of years, but in Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity Manu S. Pillai explains how European ideas shaped Hindutva.
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In the August issue:
Inside the medieval Inquisition, when Britain tried tariffs, Cyrus the Great, British naval strategy after Napoleon, South Africa’s San people, and more.
Plus: reviews, opinion, crossword and much more!
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