Caesar and Cicero’s war of words, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s peace campaign, Charles Darwin’s sexual revolution, Brazil’s free press, the Clerkenwell Outrage, and more.
Plus: reviews, opinion, crossword, debate, and much more!
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In August 1936 Franklin D. Roosevelt gave a boldly pacifist campaign speech, promising no American would have to go to war. It had seemed a realistic promise.
Brazil’s first newspaper was published from London by an exiled Freemason on first-name terms with British royalty. Who was Hipólito da Costa and what was his news?
Would St Augustine have considered the US attack on Iran a just war? The pope and the vice president are split on the matter.
As ancient Rome was divided by civil war Cicero found himself torn. Caesar was his old adversary, but he was also powerful, and it was politically and personally expedient to support him.
Empress Matilda: Queen of the Romans, Ruler of the English by Elisabeth van Houts is a sympathetic biography of the woman who would be king.
The potential implications of Charles Darwin’s theory of sexual selection did not sit well with Victorian gender mores – or with Darwin himself.
It is the most powerful political party in the world, controlling China’s future as well as its past, but was the young CCP in control of its imperial destiny?
The first Irish Republican bomb detonated on English soil was not intended as an act of terrorism, but its impact – and death toll – sent shockwaves through Victorian London.
This Dark Night: The Life of Emily Brontë by Deborah Lutz vividly reconstructs the world that produced Wuthering Heights. Are there limits to this approach?
For Albert Camus understanding the past and predicting the future may hinge on one fact: history is absurd.
Charismatic Nations: A Cultural History of Nationalism in Europe from 1800 to the Present by Joep Leerssen looks to art and not politics for the birth of the nation.
Often dismissed as a myth, was there a real man behind the legend of King Arthur?
A new translation marks the 50th anniversary of Carlo Ginzburg’s pioneering microhistory The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller.
Redressing the crimes of Pinochet’s regime has been a hard-fought and often contested process. Chile’s current presidency has revealed how easily progress can be reversed.
In The Shah’s Party and the Iranian Revolution That Followed Robert Templer reveals the hubristic high point of the Pahlavi regime’s self-regard.
Indian teams besting British sides on the polo field threatened to undermine the colonial enterprise.
