Britain

In the era of the early modern ‘secret state’, two notorious brothers set up an elaborate intelligence network, managing a vast array of spies and informers watchful for Jacobite plots against Britain.

The 18th century was the age of graffiti, when the writing on the wall turned political.

In Rites of Passage: Death & Mourning in Victorian Britain, Judith Flanders explores the commercialisation of grief and those who resisted the era’s conspicuous consumption.

Mutiny and murder at sea ended in capture for the crew of the pirate ship Revenge. Their trial was a deliberate display of the authority of the British state. How did it unfold?

General elections in Britain were once weeks-long affairs of corruption and chaos. The shift to one-day polling was slow.

On the centenary of Britain’s first Labour government, three recent histories cast a sympathetic eye over Ramsay MacDonald’s nine months in Number 10.

The British Council was founded to help the world better understand Britain and to fight fascism. As times changed, so did its remit.

One Fine Day: Britain’s Empire on the Brink by Matthew Parker and Imperial Island: A History of Empire in Modern Britain by Charlotte Lydia Riley are filled with ambition.

Soldiers on the front line in France and Flanders saw their fight as the only legitimate one. But in Britain, the mobilisation of the domestic workforce was integral to winning the First World War.

Concern for animal welfare can be precarious, as the history of Britain’s pit ponies shows.