History Matters

How should we see the natural world? For Descartes it was a mechanism, but a wondrous one.

Britain’s first book-of-the-month club – the Book Society – brought reading to a vast new audience. But not without some controversy.

How to reform an ancient Greek tyrant? Plato’s final advice to Dionysius the Younger was not well received.

In the early 20th century the prison population in England and Wales was in sharp decline, despite a rise in crime. 

Were the lost bones of medieval King Ethelbert hidden in Sherborne Abbey? A convenient discovery suggested they were. 

Reports from the First Crusade brought tales of victorious Christian soldiers eating dead bodies.

Margaret Thatcher struggled to write her own speeches. Who put the words in her mouth?

In 19th-century America abortion was weaponised as part of a culture war.

For 18th-century smugglers in Guernsey and the Isle of Man, plague was a business opportunity.

The greatest early modern authority on Ottoman Greece was Martin Cruisius – a man who had never left Germany.