Cultural

The Graces: The Extraordinary Untold Lives of Women at the Restoration Court by Breeze Barrington looks beyond the warming pan to the real Mary of Modena.

The Alienation Effect: How Central European Émigrés Transformed the British Twentieth Century by Owen Hatherley follows in the footsteps of those who fled fascism.

Historians may no longer talk of a single Celtic culture, but in The Celts: A Modern History Ian Stewart crafts a unified history of a changing idea.

Rome’s first theatre was an enormous spectacle intended to glorify Pompey’s successes. Was it all bread and circuses?

On 16 January 1926, the BBC broke the news that a murderous mob was storming the capital. Broadcasting the Barricades wasn’t supposed to be a hoax, but it was an effective one.

The concerns of daily life prompted early modern people to seek reassurance in fate, stars, and astrologers.

The remarkable fall of absinthe: from 19th-century ‘Green Fairy’ to scourge of society.

How did the People’s Republic of China cope with a literary canon filled with un-communist ideas? Comics called lianhuanhua were the answer, at least for a while.

What explains the Iranian state’s remarkable soft power in the West? The answer lies in Iran’s rich – and often romanticised – history.

British agents of empire saw their actions in India through the texts of their classical educations. They looked for Alexander, cast themselves as Aeneas and hoped to emulate Augustus.