Social

Susan Cole looks at how, though formally excluded from the political process, Athena's sisters nevertheless made their mark.

François Hartog on how urban living has coincided with the advocacy of popular rule from Plato through to Machiavelli, Rousseau and 20th-century sociologists.

John Benson on the lessons of charity from Britain's worst ever mining disaster

Keith Hopkins takes us on a tour de force via original texts of the hopes, dreams, assumptions and frustrations of the Roman schoolboy.

Did Andres Aranda Ortiz die for his crimes or his anarchist beliefs in a Barcelona prison just before Christmas 1934? Chris Ealham considers an episode that lays bare the social and political tensions of a Spain on the eve of civil war.

Anthony Pollard explains how the rivalry of two great Northern families contributed to civil war in fifteenth-century England.

Richard Cavendishon the modes and manners of the Costume Society

John Geipel chronicles the tenacity of the tongue in Brazil's Indian heritage

With a hey nonny-no - but the courtship of Elizabethan lads and lasses was not quite as buccolic as the madrigals suggest, as Eric Carlson explains.

Tabloid intrusion into the lives of the famous via the photo lens was a feature of Edwardian, as well as contemporary, Britain, as Nicholas Hiley here intriguingly reveals.