Volume 62 Issue 7 July 2012

Christopher Winn recalls the death of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and other mysterious drownings.

The romantic ‘braveheart’ image of Scotland’s past lives on. But, as Christopher A. Whatley shows, a more nuanced ‘portrait of the nation’ is emerging, one that explores the political and religious complexities of Jacobitism and its enduring myth-making power.

Patricia Cleveland-Peck tells the story of Fanny Calderón de la Barca and her life as an author, ambassador’s wife and governess to the Spanish royal family.

Given the state of academic life today, we should not be surprised that scholars seek stardom, argues Tim Stanley.

The recent killing of British soldiers by their Afghan allies echoes events of the 19th century, writes Rob Johnson.

Ann Natanson visits an exhibition in Rome that highlights the papacy’s interaction with major figures of European history.

The Jews of Algeria had lived side by side with Muslims for centuries, but the struggle for Algerian independence presented them with stark choices, as Martin Evans explains.

During the Napoleonic Wars Britain occupied the strategically important island of Sicily. Most of its inhabitants, tired of long-distance Bourbon rule, welcomed the arrangement, but their monarch did not, as Graham Darby explains.

Antony Beevor, author of a new account of the Second World War, talks to Roger Moorhouse about the importance of narrative and why he thinks new technology is not the future for history in a post-literate age.

Roger Hudson examines a photograph from 1920 taken on the eve of a profound split on the French Left.