Volume 70 Issue 9 September 2020

‘There’s always someone missing from the story.’

To imagine the beliefs and desires of our fellow beings is fundamental to the pursuit of history. Such empathy is needed now more than ever.

Eighty years on from the height of the Battle of Britain, four historians confront the nature of this key episode in the Second World War.

Holbein’s creative life during three decades of extraordinary political, religious and intellectual turbulence.

Plant, animal or other? The struggle to categorise jellyfish mirrors the desire to impose a hierarchy on the natural world.

Mary Shelley’s great novel is not a commentary on the Industrial Revolution, nor is it a simple retelling of the myth of Prometheus. It is far more original than that.

The global crisis wrought by the First World War prompted the birth of free mental health care.

The abolition of slavery was only the beginning of a culture war on race and empire that divided the intellectual classes of Victorian Britain.

Whether a museum or mosque, Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia has been a monument to selective readings of Turkey’s history.