Britain

The Loch Ness Monster’s first appearance on film captured both the hype and the scepticism surrounding cinema’s newest star.

The Specter of the Archive: Political Practice and the Information State in Early Modern Britain by Nicholas Popper explores the Elizabethan revolution in record keeping.

Cita Stelzer’s Churchill’s American Network and David Reynolds’ Mirrors of Greatness seek to bring Churchill’s contemporaries and adversaries out of his shadow.

What are stars made of? When a young astronomer upset standard explanations for the formation of the solar system, the establishment told her she was wrong – then stole her findings.

Despite their reputation, London’s private members’ clubs have never been entirely for men.

An old-fashioned feature of a fusty, inegalitarian past, when did the British stop knowing their place?

Bluestockings: The First Women’s Movement by Susannah Gibson makes a case for 18th-century proto-feminism. Do the Bluestockings fit?

Impossible Monsters: Dinosaurs, Darwin and the War between Science and Religion by Michael Taylor revels in the tangles of Victorian thought.

In the era of the early modern ‘secret state’, two notorious brothers set up an elaborate intelligence network, managing a vast array of spies and informers watchful for Jacobite plots against Britain.