Literature

Notes in the margins of early modern books can be very revealing about their readers’ lives and interests. 

Is King Lear the Shakespearean tragedy for a world of capitalism and catastrophe? 

The advent of telecommunications gave rise to a new literary genre through which female telegraphers and writers found social freedoms.

As the Nazis enclosed Warsaw’s Jewish quarter in a ghetto, a librarian set up a secret children’s library. 

Dinner parties in the ‘Revolutionary Age’ with the publisher Joseph Johnson.

Evliya Çelebi was born on 25 March 1611.

Early modern parish libraries, frequently established for the benefit of the general public, were often deliberately inaccessible.

For most Egyptians independence came with the revolution of July 1952, not with the end of the British protectorate in February 1922. Yet, as the experiences of three patriotic writers show, independence did not mean freedom.

Sherlock Holmes is the 19th century’s most famous cocaine user, but why did he take it?