Volume 66 Issue 3 March 2016

All the World's a Prison

When the European powers began exporting convicts to other continents, they did so to create a deterrent and to establish new settlements across the world. Clare Anderson traces the history of punitive passages.

After the Norman Conquest

Eleanor Parker is inspired by a visit to a village church in Oxfordshire that bears witness to one of the most turbulent and transformative periods in English history.

Who Killed James VI and I?

The accusation that James VI of Scotland and I of England was murdered by his favourite, the Duke of Buckingham, may have been a false one but it was widely believed.

Forth Railway Bridge, 1888

Roger Hudson describes how the ‘stiffest bridge in the world’ took shape following a railway disaster in 1897.