Volume 65 Issue 11 November 2015

The Media’s First Moral Panic

Goethe’s novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, was blamed for a spate of suicides during the ‘reading fever’ of the 1700s. It set a trend for manufactured outrage that is with us still.

Abyssinia out of the Shadows

Three very different writers reported on the exotic and despotic court of the Emperor Haile Selassie. Jeffrey Meyers compares and contrasts. 

A Landmark Witch Trial

In 1615 Katharina, mother of the great scientist Johannes Kepler, was accused of witchcraft. Ulinka Rublack asks what her landmark trial tells us about early-modern attitudes towards science, nature and the family.

Is it British to Weep?

The reputation of Britons as a people who tightly control their emotions in the face of adversity is not necessarily a deserved one, argues Thomas Dixon.