Britain’s First Black Olympic Medalist
February 16, 2024
Neil Duncanson— Harry Edward took a deep breath, pushed his spikes into the holes he’d just dug in the sodden cinder track and dropped his head. A vos marques. It… READ MORE
Category: European History
Devorah Baum on Marriage, Love, and Divorce
February 14, 2024
Devorah Baum, author of On Marriage, talks with us about the proposal that sparked her writing on marriage, the woes of modern dating, and the important role divorce plays in… READ MORE
The Real Tudor England
January 24, 2024
Lucy Wooding— There was no such thing as ‘Tudor England’ until long after the last Tudor was dead.1 This epoch was created in retrospect, pieced together out of countless memories… READ MORE
The Art Plunderer of Paris
January 12, 2024
Jonathan Petropoulos— The evening was planned as a form of theater, a series of carefully staged scenes. Each room, or set, in the extraordinary eighteenth-century Parisian hôtel particulier featured a… READ MORE
Ep. 128 — The Remarkable Stories of Women in British Intelligence
December 14, 2023
From spies in the Belgian network “La Dame Blanche,” knitting coded messages into jumpers, to those who interpreted aerial images and even ran entire sections, Helen Fry shows just how… READ MORE
Joint Jihad
December 6, 2023
Wolfgang G. Schwanitz— Parliaments cry about a “pan-Islamic danger,” noted the Islam scholar Martin Hartmann. “But are fellow Muslims really our enemies?”1 He asked this 111 years ago as a… READ MORE
In the Eye of the Serpent
November 17, 2023
Whitney Barlow Robles— The serpent who beguiled Eve. Medusa’s ossifying glance. The hypnotic command of Kaa in Kipling’s Jungle Book. Harry’s second year at Hogwarts, turned upside down by a basilisk…. READ MORE
Why the Crusades Matter
November 10, 2023
Christopher Tyerman— The crusades offer features to fascinate and disturb modern audiences. Surviving evidence–literary, archival, archaeological, visual and material–allows access in some detail to individual experiences as well as large… READ MORE
Feeling the Past to Touch the Future
October 27, 2023
Henry Petroski— The bubonic epidemic known as the Great Plague broke out in London in 1665 and lasted for two years. During that time, citizens who could escape to the… READ MORE
The Cookery Book
October 17, 2023
Helen Fry— During wartime women were a valuable source of intelligence-gathering because they could move much more freely in occupied countries than men. They used their “invisibility” to gather and… READ MORE
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