Like much of her reign, the accession of Razia to the sultanate of Delhi, is shrouded in mystery. The only contemporary chronicler of her reign is the Tabakat-i-Nasiri of Minhaj Siraj Juzjani, whose career had thrived during her brief tenure, and who was full of praise for her skills. “A great sovereign,” he wrote of... Continue Reading →
The portrait of Beatrice Cenci
Charles Dickens, visiting Rome early in 1845, found himself haunted by a painting he saw. It was, he said, “almost impossible to be forgotten”. It was of a young woman in white, with a white turban; she is looking back over her left shoulder towards the artist. Dickens saw in her eyes “celestial hope, and... Continue Reading →
The bleak genius of Charles M Schulz and Peanuts
The numbers are extraordinary. Charles M Schulz, whose centenary falls on 26 November 2022, spent nearly fifty years of his life producing daily comic strips for Peanuts. Between 2 October 1950 and his death in February 2000, he drew a staggering 17,897 of them. He retired in December 1999 after a series of strokes and... Continue Reading →
John Payne Collier: literary fraud, literary slug
John Payne Collier. Three words sure to chill the heart of any scholar working on early-modern literary texts. Why? Because Collier was that most interesting of phenomena: a fine scholar who was also a first-class fraud. It is to posterity’s chagrin that he lived to the age of 94 – Collier died on 17 September... Continue Reading →
Motherlands: In Search of Our Inherited Cities by Amaryllis Gacioppo; Exiles: Three Island Journeys by William Atkins
In 1688 a 19-year-old medical student from Berne named Johannes Hofer observed a condition that medicine had yet to define. Symptoms of this ‘melancholy delirium’ might include fever, disturbed sleep, palpitations, loss of appetite and anxiety – sometimes ultimately leading to death. Hofer noted the case of a fellow student from Berne, now living in... Continue Reading →
Clément Ader, the théatrophone and the world’s first live-streaming
As a child in the first years of the 20th century the great American film director Preston Sturges lived in a stylish apartment in Paris with his mother. An earphone hung beside the fireplace. He tried it; it seemed dead. Then one evening a family friend visited and, after dinner, sat in rapture, the earphone... Continue Reading →
The Grunwick dispute: workers’ rights, street violence and ‘the Ascot of the left’
“It was a long hot summer.” Thus Lord Scarman begun his account of the small dispute at Grunwick, a film-processing company in north-west London, which escalated into one of the defining industrial conflicts of the late 1970s. The dispute began with the sacking of a young worker, Devshi Bhudia, for slow work on Friday 20th... Continue Reading →
The first defenestration of Prague
The defenestration of three Catholics from the high windows of the castle in Prague in May 1618 helped precipitate the Thirty Years War. But it wasn’t the first time the people of Bohemia had resorted to this distinctive method of extra-judicial killing. On the first occasion, two centuries earlier, the proximate causes were the same:... Continue Reading →
The killing of Jean-Paul Marat by Charlotte Corday
She had planned to kill him in public. But the summer of 1793 in Paris was exceptionally hot and Jean-Paul Marat’s painful skin condition - a form of psoriatic arthritis - required him to spend long periods in his bath at home in the Rue des Cordeliers. It was there, around 7pm on the evening... Continue Reading →
‘Humanity Dick’ and the founding of the RSPCA
On 16 June 1824 a small group of men met in Old Slaughter’s Coffee House in St Martin’s Lane, London. They had been brought together by Arthur Broome, animal-welfare campaigner and vicar of St Mary’s in Bow, but the leading light was Irish MP Richard Martin, widely known as ‘Humanity Dick’. Thanks to Martin, Parliament... Continue Reading →
Victoria Claflin Woodhull: the first woman to run for the US presidency
To her enemies, she was Mrs Satan. To Walt Whitman, she was “a prophecy of the future”. To Gloria Steinem, from the vantage point of the 1970s, she was “the most controversial suffragist of them all”. But to the Equal Rights Party on 6 June 1872, she was their newly ratified candidate for the presidency... Continue Reading →
The Kyivan queens of medieval Europe
Ukraine has been part of European history since before the Norman Conquest. Indeed, in the middle of the 11th century, the queens of Norway, Hungary, France and Poland were all Kievan Rus’ princesses. The first three were daughters of Yaroslav, grand prince of Kyiv and Ingegerd Olofsdotter of Sweden. The fourth was Yaroslav’s sister, Maria.... Continue Reading →
Stravinsky, Nijinsky and the riotous premiere of The Rite of Spring
It should have been a triumph. The premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring on 29 May 1913 brought together the then up-and-coming composer with Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe company and its star dancer, Vaslav Nijinsky, who would choreograph the piece. Even the venue, the luxurious Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, was new. There... Continue Reading →
Joy undimmed: John Masefield and The Midnight Folk
John Masefield was in his last year as Poet Laureate when I was born in 1966. I remember copying out his poem ‘Cargoes’ in primary school – "Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir . . ." – and wondering what all these strange, beautiful-sounding words meant as I laboured over my ascenders and descenders. That... Continue Reading →
The Great Wine Blight: how French winemakers learned to love America
The Columbian Exchange is a much discussed phenomenon, but it can have had few more surprising consequences than the near total destruction of European wine production in the 19th century. The cause was phylloxera, a microscopic yellow aphid native to the eastern coast of the United States, that feeds exclusively on the roots of grapevines.... Continue Reading →
The House of Dudley: A New History of Tudor England by Joanne Paul
As the nine-year-old Edward VI rode through London on the way to his coronation in Westminster Abbey in February 1547, he paused for a while to watch a man perform on a tightrope strung from the steeple of St Paul’s. He might have been advised to study the man who rode ahead of him too.... Continue Reading →
The discovery of Parkinson’s Disease
At 10am on 7 October 1794 a 39-year-old physician named James Parkinson presented himself in Whitehall for interrogation by William Pitt and the Privy Council. They were investigating what became known as the Popgun Plot, an alleged attempt to assassinate George III. Parkinson, a member of the radical London Corresponding Society, knew some of those... Continue Reading →
The Dissolution of the Monasteries: A New History by James G Clark
On 4 August 1540, Thomas Epsam, a former monk of the Benedictine Abbey at Westminster, was brought from Newgate and made to stand before the justices. He had been a prisoner for three years, but still “he wold not aske the kynges pardon nor be sworne to be true to him”, the chronicler Edward Hall... Continue Reading →
Evliya Çelebi: Ottoman traveller, writer, dreamer
Evliya Çelebi was born in Istanbul on 25 March 1611. He is best known in the Anglophone world through the translations of Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall in the 19th century and, more recently, Robert Dankoff. His ten-volume Seyahatname is perhaps the longest piece of travel writing in world literature; Dankoff says the first time he read... Continue Reading →
The fall of the Knights Templar
Sometime around 1340 Ludolph of Sudheim, a German priest travelling around the Holy Land, encountered two elderly men, one from Burgundy, the other from Toulouse, in the mountains by the Dead Sea. They told him they were Knights Templar, taken prisoner by the Mamluks after the fall of Acre in May 1291 – the last,... Continue Reading →
Mathew Lyons 