History Today

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. 

Even in a pastoral idyll, there is death.

‘Timing is everything.’

Roman poet Catullus transformed an unremarkable bird – the sparrow – into a contested symbol of eroticism.

For more than a century, what is now Yemen has seen waves of insurgency and conflict backed by competing foreign powers. 

A global trade in feathers, with London at its heart, saw hundreds of millions of birds killed every year. Emily Williamson waged a long and furious campaign against it.

The scorchingly honest assessments of the great and not-so-good that flowed from ‘Chips’ Channon’s poison pen.

Four distinguished scholars consider a historical question of enormous contemporary resonance.