Political

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.

November 2024 marks the 30th anniversary of the first passenger trains between London and Paris. What does the history of the Channel Tunnel tell us about Britain’s relationship with its neighbours?

When paying off the Vikings failed to yield lasting peace, on 13 November 1002 king Æthelred ordered the slaughter of England’s Danes instead.

In Patria: Lost Countries of South America, Laurence Blair explores nine nations, dissolved or imagined, and what they tell us about Latin America.

Where fraught national histories are concerned, do policies of remembrance and education work, or is it better to wipe the slate clean?

Can The Last Dynasty: Ancient Egypt from Alexander the Great to Cleopatra and The Fall of Egypt and the Rise of Rome: A History of the Ptolemies fashion a finale for the pharaohs?

Ancient Roman election advice suggested some uncomfortable campaign strategies. Evidence from Pompeii suggests many candidates followed it enthusiastically.

How the first Conservative leadership election modernised the party in the 1960s.

The Cold War forged new international relationships in which physical distance seemed overcome by ideological proximity. In North Korea, East Germany found a fellow traveller – and a fellow victim.

In A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America, Richard Slotkin attempts to untangle the stories that the US tells itself about race, colonialism and the Civil War. Is it a lost cause?