England

The Horse: England's Sacred Beast?

The English aversion to eating horse flesh, recently highlighted in a number of food scandals, dates back to the coming of Christianity, as Jordan Claridge explains.

Four Centuries of Shakespearean Production

F.E. Halliday finds that every age, from the first Elizabethan to the present one, has evolved its own methods of producing Shakespeare; sometimes with results that might have surprised the dramatist.

A Fifteenth-Century Merchant family

A solid middle-class clan who exported English wool to foreign markets, the Celys have left behind them a graphic record of their private affairs and shrewd commercial dealings, as Alison Hanham here finds.

George Bubb Dodington, 1691-1762

John Carswell introduces George Bubb Dodington; a man of pleasure; an indefatigable careerist; and an industrious and successful politician.

Walter Bagehot

Banker, economist, editor and critic, Bagehot “was the antithesis of the grand Victorian man of letters.”

Letters from Maria Josepha Lady Stanley to Her Father Lord Sheffield

These letters, written between 1797 and 1815, are part of a series from Maria Josepha Stanley to her father Lord Sheffield. At the beginning of the period Maria Josepha had been married six months, and was living in Newcastle-upon-Tyne where her husband, a Captain in the Cheshire Militia, had been posted with his regiment to resist any attempted invasion by the forces of the Directorate. Edited by Lord Stanley of Alderley.