Volume 75 Issue 7 July 2025

Hinduism predates colonialism by thousands of years, but in Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity Manu S. Pillai explains how European ideas shaped Hindutva.

On 25 July 1908 chemistry professor Kikunae Ikeda gave name to an elusive new taste: umami.

Hertha Ayrton’s experiment in a bathtub may have saved lives in the trenches, but it caused ripples among the ranks of the Royal Society.

‘What’s the most exciting field in history today? Native American history – the Native nations have only begun to tell their histories.’

‘I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer’: Letters on Love and Marriage from the World’s First Personal Advice Column by Mary Beth Norton reveals the 17th-century origins of the agony aunt.

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

How did a Gulf backwater become a global powerbroker? Saudi Arabia: A Modern History by David Commins explores the uneasy alliance between oil, autocracy, and Wahhabism.

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

In Language and Social Relations in Early Modern England Hillary Taylor listens in the archives for the voices of ordinary people.

How did Swahili become an East African lingua franca? It was not by accident.