From Russia (to Ireland) with Love
In 1805, a lady’s maid from Cork visited the palace of a Russian princess and inadvertently became one of the first published Irish writers on Russia.
Miscellanies
Stalin’s Danish Mystery
The small island of Bornholm gave Stalin a Danish foothold at the end of the Second World War. Why did he give it up?
Exterminating the Grand Tour
The French Grand Tour was the preserve of the elite, but in the decades before the Revolution ‘the art of being abroad’ endured a crisis. Who should travel and why?
Arthur Conan Doyle and the Adventure of the Boer War
Eight years after giving up medicine for writing, the internationally famous creator of Sherlock Holmes became Dr Doyle once more, on the front line of the Boer War.
‘Strangled for a bird’: The Case of the Aldbury Poachers
A double murder in an English wood became a Victorian cause célèbre, provoking a national debate about the tyranny of land ownership and the loss of ancient liberties.
Behold Palestine
Starting in the 1960s, the Palestinian revolution was galvanised by the production of protest posters which depicted a united people and a hopeful future. As the liberation movement fractured, such visions disappeared.
Deporting Ho Chi Minh
When, in 1931, the Vietnamese revolutionary Nguyen Ai Quoc was discovered to be hiding in Hong Kong, the French authorities requested the British extradite him to Indochina where a death sentence awaited.
The Afterlife of the Berlin Wall
The fall of the Berlin Wall posed various questions. Was a united Germany dangerous? How to protect the East’s heritage? And how should the Wall be remembered?
Switzerland’s Nation of Hoteliers
At the turn of the 20th century, Switzerland embraced the Grand Hotel. The First World War brought one golden age of hotels to an end, ushering in a new, more uncertain one.
Was Thomas Turner Lonely?
Loneliness as an emotion was absent in English writing before 1800. What does the diary of a Georgian widower reveal about its connection with the loss of faith?