What Shakespearean food reveals about early modern England
Shakespeare and his peers served up hearty helpings of diverse dishes and ingredients – many of them spiced with forgotten meanings. This Long Read written by Sam Bilton reveals how food allusions ill...
12 Apr 14min
A Victorian murder mystery
By 1889, Jack the Ripper's grisly murders had sparked terror throughout London. So when the mutilated body of a woman was found beneath railway arches near the Thames, a coded alert was dispatched to ...
5 Apr 17min
How empires end
How do civilisations collapse? That was the question at the heart of Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Two hundred and fifty years after it was published, this L...
29 Mars 22min
Why Britain turned its back on the goose step
Extremism was on the march across continental Europe in the 1920s and 1930s – yet Britons chose a different, more moderate path. This Long Read, written by Alwyn Turner, explores why Britain largely t...
23 Mars 24min
1066: not just the Norman Conquest
1066 is synonymous with the battle of Hastings. Yet while Duke William of Normandy was launching his conquest of England, the rest of Europe had its own crises to contend with. This Long Read written ...
16 Mars 22min
Medieval England’s terror of the living dead
At the turn of the 12th century, two men from a Staffordshire village died suddenly. Their lifeless bodies were taken to the local graveyard and solemnly laid to rest – but a few days later, they were...
9 Mars 18min
How the SAS reinvented itself after WW2
Britain’s War Office thanked the SAS for its remarkable efforts in WW2 by abolishing it – yet soon realised the error of its ways. This Long Read written by Gavin Mortimer tells the story of how the e...
2 Mars 19min
How the Vikings menaced the Mediterranean
Killing, burning, pillaging, enslaving. Even when heading to sunnier climes, Viking raiders deployed the same tactics that they had used along the shores of northern and western Europe, as this Long R...
23 Feb 24min
