The ballad, then, underscores the sensational, multimedia nature of the Logroño auto de fe, which laid bare a nightmarish ...

What the war released above all was a spirit of ephemerality’ Mark Polizzotti is Head of Publications at the Metropolitan ...

Unfortunately, most of Euripides’ work has not come down to us. Only 17 complete tragedies and one satyr play have survived.

H elen Cam (1885-1968), the first woman to be elected to a chair at Harvard, was a formidable English medievalist. Unusually ...

In 1938 the American literary critic Howard Mumford Jones published an article in The Atlantic titled ‘Patriotism – but How?’ As Europe teetered on the brink of war, Jones observed how fascist ...

In 1866 James Hole, a writer from Leeds, called for ‘a little wholesome despotism’ in tackling the problems of housing the urban working classes. He was not alone in favouring a no-nonsense, top-down ...

When the connoisseur Gerrit Braamcamp died in 1771 the auction of his collection was one of Amsterdam’s events of the year. Some 20,000 people saw it; 2,000 copies of the catalogue were sold.

When his father, Rama II, died in 1824 the Siamese throne went to Mongkut’s older half-brother, who ruled as Rama III. Mongkut, aged 19, joined a monastery. Three months was customary. Mongkut stayed ...

A rather unusual petition from October 1716 is tucked away in the pope’s diocesan archives in the basilica of San Giovanni in Rome: Antonio Piervenanzi, parish priest of San Benedetto in Piscinola, ...