Volume 75 Issue 11 November 2025

In Turncoat: Roundhead to Royalist, the Double Life of Cromwell’s Spy, Dennis Sewell asks whether George Downing was the ‘biggest scoundrel in Stuart England’?

‘What is the most common misconception about my field? That medieval people were dumber than modern ones.’

The Maginot Line: A New History by Kevin Passmore confronts the myths surrounding the fall of France in 1940.

Rome welcomed and tended to the vast numbers of pilgrims who arrived in the 16th century, but its attitude to its own poor could be very different.

The ancestor of the London Gazette was launched on 16 November 1665, surviving its bitter rival to become the oldest newspaper in the English-speaking world still in print.

Postwar state support for agriculture in the UK has been hailed a great success, but it had unexpected consequences.

On 14 November 1848 the Fox sisters conjured up a movement when they made contact with the dead – or so they claimed.

As the medieval book trade declined, Oxford scribes had to turn their hands to other crafts to get by.

The Heretic of Cacheu by Toby Green and Worlds of Unfreedom by Roquinaldo Ferreira, painstakingly recreate the worlds at the beginning and end of Portugal’s slave trade.

The past is full of unfamiliar ideas and beliefs, but – as Evelyn Underhill has proven – some things are timeless.