WRITER & HISTORIAN
Locals called the area ‘La Cività’; a clue, perhaps. Antiquarian Lucas Holstenius proposed it as the site of Pompeii as early as 1637. But formal excavations didn’t begin until 1748. The site wasn’t regarded as interesting or valuable in itself, but merely a sources of decorative antiquities for Charles VII, king of Naples. This wasn’t... Continue Reading →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
Would Mary Shelley have conceived of Frankenstein without the work of Italian scientist Luigi Galvani? Looking back at its creation, she recalled long conversations with Lord Byron and her husband about Galvani’s ideas. “Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated,” she wrote. “Galvanism had given token of such things.” Galvani’s great breakthrough had come on 20... Continue Reading →
Thanks to lockdown, sales of jigsaw puzzles grew nearly 40% in 2020, reaching £100 million for the first time. It’s a far cry from the puzzle’s humble origin in a printmakers shop just off Drury Lane. The concept of children’s publishing was slowly emerging in the 18th century, with much of its focus on education... Continue Reading →
The year before Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, another writer, Olympe de Gouges, published a comparable call for equality during the turmoil of revolutionary France. De Gouges’ Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne, published in September 1791, was a direct response to the Déclaration des droits... Continue Reading →
The British Library’s manuscript collection is built on that amassed by antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton in the early 17th century. Gifted to the nation in 1701, it was stored at Essex House on the Strand for several years before safety concerns led it to be moved somewhere “much more safe from fire” – Ashburnham House,... Continue Reading →
Mathew Lyons 