For most of the late 16th and early 17th century, theatre companies touring England were welcomed in provincial towns. But as tastes changed, players found themselves take second billing to moral concerns.
The Great Exchange: Making the News in Early Modern Europe by Joad Raymond Wren looks to the 15th century for the birth of the press.
Fearing the loss of regional identity, at the end of the 19th century, the French Basques invented a cultural tradition – but did that make them a threat to national unity?
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.
