Alexander Lee

H.P. Lovecraft asked us to imagine a much deeper past than modern comforts and science allow us to perceive — and the monsters that might dwell there.

If the present, with its conflicts and uncertainties, is impossible to know, asks Italo Calvino, how can we hope to understand the past?

‘What is the most common misconception about my field? That the Renaissance was a ‘secular’ age.’

Confronted by a confusing and complex national history, Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk decided to embrace myth rather than debunk it.

The Second World War disrupted narratives of mankind’s ‘progress’, but – as William Golding captured so vividly in Lord of the Flies – human history has always been a balancing act between enlightenment and calamity.

In the chaos unleashed by the October Revolution, Mikhail Bulgakov found a past become fragmented and confused, and history the domain of madmen and devils.

‘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.

The controversial outcome of a sculpture competition between Filippo Brunelleschi and Lorenzo Ghiberti changed the urban fabric of Renaissance Florence – or so the story goes.

A male heir might have saved Queen Mary’s reign, and changed the shape of global Catholicism for good.

According to some, written history began in the 14th century. It may seem ridiculous, but the Phantom Time conspiracy theory has serious implications.