Cultural

Historians ask, what constitutes the history of popular culture?

Dai Smith, senior lecturer at University College, Cardiff, offers his thoughts.

War is prominent among the forms of human experience that have most readily stimulated poetry. In combat both mind and body strain at the end of their tether.

David Starkey visits the Lincoln Center for a night at the opera.

Paul Preston expresses both a historic and a musical interpretation of Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov.

For the past 600 years the island of Java has been the scene for the encounter of the two major cultural and religious traditions of the world.

David Low, the cartoonist, met Horatio Blimp, a retired Colonel, in a Turkish bath near Charing Cross in the early 1930s. Many agree with C.S. Lewis that Colonel Blimp was 'the most characteristic expression of the English temper in the period between the two wars.'

Roderick Lyall on the royal household of a medieval Scottish monarch

The European images of Argentina are complex, and mirror profound debates about nationalism and universalism, popular and elite culture.

The Duke of Wellington proved a gift to the cartoonists of 'Punch' - he was a figure the magazine's readership would recognise, and he did not look unlike Mr Punch himself.