Cycling Eighty Years Ago
David Rubinstein describes a change in social habits when the new bicycle replaced the old Penny Farthing.
Feature
A Royal Patrimony: The Prado Museum and Spanish History
Jan Read traces how Spain's people, their royals, and their most famous museum have developed together.
How Football was Born
The origins of soccer can be found among the people, not the privileged who sought to define it in the 19th century.
The Case of the Slave Ship Zong
Though the massacre of captives aboard the British slave ship Zong scandalised society, the pace of reform was slow.
The Great Frost Fair of 1683-4
For nearly 400 years, London's citizens poured down from the streets to hold a frost fair upon the solid ice of the Thames.
Soviet Nuclear Testing in the Arctic
During the Cold War, 224 nuclear weapons were denotated at Novaya Zemlya in the Soviet Union’s remote Arctic north. Only with the collapse of the USSR in 1989 did the true scale become known.
The Years Before the Stock Exchange
Nicholas Lane examines how, during the century before the London Stock Exchange acquired a building of its own in 1773, brokers met and transacted business in the coffee houses of Exchange Alley
The Foundation of the Bank of England
Nicholas Lane discusses the reasons of business and war that led to the establishment of a national bank in London in 1694.
The Politics of Wine in 18th-century England
After the upheavals of 1688, England’s shifting social order needed new ways to define itself. A taste for fine claret became one such marker of wealth and power, as Charles Ludington explains.
Syria: Caught in a Trap
Bashar al-Assad is a child of the Cold War and the Arab-Israeli conflict. These events underpin Syria’s authoritarian regime and its horrific actions.