Volume 75 Issue 7 July 2025

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.

On 5 July 1852 the curtain was raised on Barney Barnato, one of the richest men in South Africa.

How to reform an ancient Greek tyrant? Plato’s final advice to Dionysius the Younger was not well received.

Long overshadowed by Lindbergh, The Big Hop: The First Non-Stop Flight Across the Atlantic and Into the Future by David Rooney returns Alcock and Brown to aviation's top flight.

In the early 20th century the prison population in England and Wales was in sharp decline, despite a rise in crime. 

Poets across the ages have sought help with their writing – but AI bears no comparison with the divine.