Behind the Times

For more than a century, what is now Yemen has seen waves of insurgency and conflict backed by competing foreign powers. 

Japan’s responsibility for ‘comfort women’ is avoided by the state and written out of national histories. Activists are working to make Japan confront its past.

Electric cars seem to offer a solution to the problem of the internal combustion engine. But technological advances have other consequences. 

Ethiopia’s current crisis is rooted in a long history of regional and ethnic defiance towards the political centre. 

Belarusian memory of the Second World War once helped legitimise the Lukashenka regime. Now it is undermining it. 

Historians and curators in heritage organisations, such as the National Trust, do not invent the past, they uncover it. 

Chinese history is dominated by a nationalist interpretation that owes much to British ideas of the 19th and early 20th centuries. 

Are we adequately prepared for the toll this pandemic will take on mental health? 

The abolition of slavery was only the beginning of a culture war on race and empire that divided the intellectual classes of Victorian Britain.

The sinister reach of East Germany’s Ministry for State Security did not end in 1989. According to the British press, the Stasi is still with us.