WRITER & HISTORIAN
Napoleon loved his bath. Sometimes he lay in it for an hour or two, holding meetings or listening while an aide read him his correspondence. “One hour in the bath is worth four hours of sleep,” he said. Afterwards came the frictions, a cleansing ritual of his own devising. He stood naked and poured a... Continue Reading →
“The fine arts are five in number: painting, music, poetry, sculpture, and architecture – whereof the principal branch is confectionery.” It’s a bold point of view, even for a patissier. But Antonin Carême, personal chef to the rich and powerful of early 19th-century imperial France, was nothing if not ambitious. Born on 8 June 1783... Continue Reading →
When the Jesuits first arrived in Ethiopia in 1557 they encountered a Christian society whose roots rivalled Rome for antiquity. The region had converted in the fourth century; its royal family claimed descent from the bibilical king Menilek and the queen of Sheba. But, from the point of view of western Christendom, it had been... Continue Reading →
There were already several cracks in the dome of Justinian’s church of Santa Sophia, in Constantinople, and it was barely twenty years old. Two great earthquakes, in October and December 557, had done the damage. Some discerned a divine hand at work: “the shocks… had occurred through God’s benevolence”, John Malalas, a pious contemporary chronicler,... Continue Reading →
In the summer of 1992, Gloria Davey discovered an old ruined church near Swaffham in Norfolk. It had no roof, no windows, no door. Satanists were using it for their rites: inverted crosses daubed the walls, a pentagram the floor. A grave had been opened, giving up its bones. Gloria’s husband Bob, who before retirement... Continue Reading →
Alexis de Tocqueville saw some of them, in the dead of winter 1831, while researching what would become Democracy in America. They were Choctaw, crossing the Mississippi at Memphis. Among them were the wounded and the sick, new-born babies, old men at the point of death. Snow had frozen hard on the ground; great blocks... Continue Reading →
The death of James IV at the battle of Flodden in September 1513 was a catastrophe for his country. He left behind the one-year-old James V to take the throne, and, as regent, his English wife Margaret Tudor, sister of Henry VIII, whose army had just deprived the nation of its king. Within a year,... Continue Reading →
Walkelin, the Norman bishop of Winchester, had a problem. He needed more wood for his new cathedral, being built on unpromisingly marshy ground a little way from the city’s two existing Saxon minsters. He went to the man who had appointed him, William the Conqueror. William offered him as many trees from a nearby royal... Continue Reading →
The Archpriest Avvakum Petrov spent the last fourteen years of his life in a pit in Pustozersk, high above the Arctic Circle. Born around 1620 in a small village in Nizhny Novgorod, he had become a leading figure among the Old Believers in the schism that split the Russian church in the 17th century. Patriarch... Continue Reading →
Zhu Youjian, known as the Chongzhen Emperor, was the last of the Ming dynasty to rule China. He came to the imperial throne of China in October 1627 aged 16, on the death of his older brother. As crown prince he had dreamt of seeing a black dragon coiled around a pillar in the palace,... Continue Reading →
Life in the England of AD1000 was grim. About 10 per cent of the population were slaves; in the South West 20 per cent. The punishment for a male slave accused of theft was to be stoned to death by his fellow slaves. Men would club together to buy a female slave to gang rape;... Continue Reading →
It was the evening of October 13 1761, shortly after 9:30pm, that Pierre Calas discovered the body of his older brother, 29-year-old Marc-Antoine, hanging in a downstairs doorway of the family home in Toulouse. Their father, Jean, a cloth merchant, had his premises on the ground floor. The family had been dining in an upstairs... Continue Reading →
Artist José Guadalupe Posada was born on 2 February 1852 in the city of Aguascalientes in central Mexico. Biographical details are scant. He produced over 20,000 engravings across his career, first using lithography, then wood- and metal-cuts, and finally relief etching, a technique most associated with William Blake. But when he died in January 1913,... Continue Reading →
Elizabeth Justice was surely not alone in being young and unhappily married in 18th-century London. Where she was singular, however, was in how she responded to her circumstance. She insisted on separating from her husband, Henry Justice, after he “struck her such a blow on the head that it swelled much”. Then, when he persistently... Continue Reading →
Ben Jonson called it “the poetry of steeples”. In his Bedfordshire youth, John Bunyan was seduced by, if not addicted to, its pleasures. So ubiquitous was bell ringing to England in the 17th century that at least two sources from the 1650s – a religious tract and a poem – attest to the country’s nickname,... Continue Reading →
Halfway up the high street in Totnes, a small town on the river Dart in Devon, a modest stone is set into the edge of the road. It claims to mark the point at which Brutus, legendary founder of Britain, first set foot in these islands. Grandson of the equally legendary Trojan hero Aeneas, Brutus... Continue Reading →
The Anglo-Ashanti wars began with a debacle for the British. On 8 January 1824, word reached Cape Coast that the Ashanti were advancing. Sir Charles M’Carthy, newly appointed governor, divided up the forces at his disposal and hurried a few hundred men up country. They waded through waist-deep mud and slept exposed to torrential rain.... Continue Reading →
She was born in Domrémy in north-eastern France, where she was known as Jeannette. When she signed her name, she wrote Jehanne. But she called herself Jeanne La Pucelle, Joan the Maid. Even to call her ‘Joan of Arc’ – after her father’s name – is to deny something of her identity. Saint Michael’s had... Continue Reading →
It was the morning of 22 December 1938 and the phone was ringing at the newly established museum in East London, in South Africa’s Eastern Cape. The call was for Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, a young curator, then busy reconstructing a fossil dinosaur. Latimer had asked the local trawlermen to alert her to anything unusual in their... Continue Reading →
The idea came to him while shaving, he said. But it would be five years before American Civil War historian Philip van Doren Stern finished ‘The Greatest Gift’, his sweet, slight fantasy about a man contemplating suicide who get the chance to see what his small-town world would be like if he had never been... Continue Reading →
Mathew Lyons 