Feature

Catherine II, by Fyodor Stepanovich Rokotov, c.1770.

The End of a Nation

Wedged between Russia, Prussia and Austria, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth faced extinction in the 18th century.

Beauty and the Beast, 1896, illustration by Walter Crane.

The Moral of the Story

Illustrated picture books in Victorian England reached new aesthetic heights. But was it always for the benefit of the children?

Alfred the Great’s statue in Wantage, by Count Gleichen, 1877.

How Great was Alfred?

In uniting the peoples of Wessex and Mercia, the celebrated king left an ideological legacy of lasting importance.

Dragomans

Here be Dragomans

For wealthy tourists travelling to the Middle East in the 19th century, the services of a dragoman were an essential purchase. Yet the often difficult lives of these local agents and guides remain elusive. 

Melancholia. Engraving by Sebald Beham, 1539.

400 Years of Melancholising

Robert Burton’s encyclopedic curiosity The Anatomy of Melancholy continues to offer remarkable insights into mental health.

Bodies of British officers killed in Dublin on Bloody Sunday are taken for burial, 25 November 1920.

Britannia’s ‘Huns’

The moral authority Britain gained during the First World War was undermined by the behaviour of the Crown Forces during the Irish War of Independence.

A Navajo woman and two young men at Ford Defiance, in what was then New Mexico, 1873.

America’s Western Problem

Indigenous peoples in the West of the United States continued to be held in bondage long after the abolition of plantation slavery in the South.