Literature

Love on the Wire

The advent of telecommunications gave rise to a new literary genre through which female telegraphers and writers found social freedoms.

The Underground Library

As the Nazis enclosed Warsaw’s Jewish quarter in a ghetto, a librarian set up a secret children’s library. 

Echo Chamber

Dinner parties in the ‘Revolutionary Age’ with the publisher Joseph Johnson.

Libraries for All

Early modern parish libraries, frequently established for the benefit of the general public, were often deliberately inaccessible.

The Strange Death of Liberal Egypt

For most Egyptians the country’s independence came with the revolution of July 1952, not with the end of the British protectorate in February 1922. Yet, as the experiences of three patriotic writers show, independence did not mean freedom.