Volume 73 Issue 7 July 2023

At 9pm on 26 July 1609, Thomas Harriot pointed his telescope at a five-day-old crescent moon. It made him the first person to train such an instrument on the skies and map the moon. 

The finished Menin Gate memorial, unveiled on 24 July 1927, recorded 54,896 British and imperial soldiers who died at Ypres between 1914 and 1918, and whose bodies were lost. 

An account of the sex lives of European intellectuals is full of gossip – and as shallow as the society pages.

Recent royal crises reveal echoes of discontent in 1870s Britain, when disquiet with monarchy manifested in calls for its abolition. 

Art reveals the past – if you know how to look.

The anti-Russian poetry of Frances Browne, the ‘Blind Poetess of Ulster’.

Is it time to say goodbye to Eastern Europe, a world remade so frequently by empires, war and political ideologies that it scarcely stays the same for two generations in a row?

What does it mean to be happy? For poets, medieval and modern, joy comes in many forms. 

Child-murderer, arch villain, failed monarch, ‘northern’. Have efforts to redeem Richard III succeeded or is he still one of history’s worst kings?

Why am I a historian of Irish politics? I grew up in 1970s Belfast, where contested versions of history were literally written on the walls.