Volume 69 Issue 1 January 2019

Social mobility and self-invention in the pre-digital age.

On 28 January 1393 a party at the French royal residence ended in tragedy.

On the women who made imperial Rome.

Venetian officials sought to stem a ‘plague’ of sodomy by promoting the heterosexual sex trade.

An Icelandic scholar exemplifies the rich cultural exchanges of the Middle Ages. 

Afghanistan: A History from 1260 to the Present by Jonathan L. Lee is a history fit from the Taliban.

Though denied credit Rosalind Franklin’s work on the molecular structure of DNA was pivotal to Watson and Crick’s discovery of the double helix.

These Truths: a History of the United States by Jill Lepore is a reminder of how tenaciously previous generations have clung to the view that the country is the ‘last, best hope of earth’.

‘The most common misconception about my field is that classicists study a past that no longer impacts on our world today.’

Germany is the country most closely associated with militarism, but Britain has had its militarist moments, too.