The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
‘Specimens of Snobbery’: Cricket and the Hypocrisy of the Victorian Imagination ‘The national game of cricket,’ wrote Lord William Lennox in 1840, ‘has a peculiar claim to the people generally; and is one of those games open alike to all. It is free from selfishness,...
Thomas Messel, what first attracted you to the period or periods you work in? The focus of my study was a late eighteenth-century ancestor called Elizabeth Linley. I was aware that she eloped with and married the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, but initially, I...
Elizabeth Linley at the age of seventeen is England’s most celebrated singer. Her beauty and voice can captivate the King, or send an audience into a state of wild infectious hysteria, but suddenly and mysteriously she disappears during the night of March the 18th...
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The History behind The Bratinsky Affair "It is not the wimpled version of history that is interesting but its brutality." - Hilary Mantel The story of Countess Irina Bratinsky, née O’Rourke de Breffny, has its roots in the religious wars of 17th-century Ireland and...
The Five Armies That Made Europe Regrettably, war is inevitable. Many of us who have had the privilege of being born in Western democracies after 1945 have been spared having to confront war directly. This has created a false optimism that future generations may not...
Echoing Greens: How Cricket Shaped the English Imagination, by Brendan Cooper It is now a cliché - perhaps always has been - to refer to cricket as a rich quarry for artistic achievement, even as mainstream coverage becomes less fixated on the written word and more...
Summer Reads from Aspects of HistoryLucy Ashe Author of The Sleeping BeautiesThe Eights is Joanna Miller’s debut novel that combines fascinating historical research with the creation of four compelling female characters, The Eights is set at St Hugh’s College, Oxford,...
Views on age and life’s milestones have changed over time. In the last century average life expectancy exceeded what we would call middle age for the first time and in the process changed perspectives. Empress Matilda, one of the subjects of Eighteen, married Henry V...
Nelson: Hero of the Seas, by Dominic Sandbrook On 24 September 1805, Admiral Horatio Nelson was waiting for an audience with Lord Castlereagh, Secretary for War and the Colonies, at the Colonial Office. In the assembly room with him was Sir Arthur Wellesley, who had...
