WRITER & HISTORIAN
On 7 September 1592, the Madre de Dios was brought into the harbour at Dartmouth. Seven decks high and weighing some 1,600 tonnes, it was the largest ship England had ever seen. It was also the richest. Its hold was packed with luxury goods: silk, damask, taffeta, calico; carpets, quilts, canopies; pepper, cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon;... Continue Reading →
“This, I must confess, seems owing to nothing but to the Fate of Things,” Daniel Defoe wrote glumly in 1724 of the decline of Dunwich. The town in Suffolk had once been the largest port on the East Anglian coast; in the 11th century its estimated population of 3,000 put it in the top fifth of... 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 →
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 →
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 →
“Many historians begin their chronicles by praising history, but these praises always sell the matter short,” wrote Damião de Góis, a Portuguese royal archivist, in his account of the reign of Manuel I, published in 1566-7. “History is infinite,” de Góis reckoned, “and cannot be confined within any limits.” It is an unusual manifesto for... Continue Reading →
Forget the war for a moment. Since 1986 there has been an area of land between Kyiv and the Belarus border the size of Luxembourg which people are forbidden to enter. At its heart is the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl, which went into meltdown that year in what was probably the worst nuclear disaster... Continue Reading →
One night in the winter of 1961–2, the anthropologist Hugh Brody sat on the bed in his attic room in his parents’ house, placed a cartridge in his shotgun, leaned the shotgun barrel against his head and pulled the trigger. ‘My sense of having no future was so complete that it obscured the possibility of... Continue Reading →
Humanity has always been a noisy animal. As long ago as 1700 BC, a Babylonian god was complaining that the “noise of mankind has become too much./I am losing sleep over their racket.” Cities, where more than half of us now live, have only got louder. A New York subway train clocks in at 98... Continue Reading →
Pop music doesn’t go in much for redemption as a rule, but Bunyan’s life is – characteristically – resolutely atypical. She seems like Hermione, Leontes’ wife in The Winters’ Tale, turned to stone for twenty years and then returned, movingly, to life. If you’re reading this, the chances are that you’re familiar with the outlines... Continue Reading →
I'm delighted to have recorded another episode for Suzannah Lipscomb's brilliant podcast, Not Just the Tudors, this time on Sir Walter Ralegh and the tragic fantasy of El Dorado. It's available to listen to here. My previous episode, in which we discussed the Dissolution of the Monasteries, is available to listen to here. Not Just... Continue Reading →
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 →
In the last days of 1835 the explorer Robert Schomburgk stood on the shores of Lake Amucu in western central Guiana. In April, the surrounding savannah would be inundated by the rising tides of two nearby river systems creating the illusion of a great body of water; but now, in December, the waters were low.... Continue Reading →
Amelia Earhart, aged 40, disappeared with her plane and her navigator on 2 July 1937 on the longest leg on what was intended to be the first circumnavigation of the world by a woman in an airplane. How does that fact change how we read her life? She was, her high-school yearbook said, “the girl... Continue Reading →
In the late afternoon of 26 July 1533, Atahualpa, last true emperor of the Incas, was led out into the public square of Cajamarca a city in the Andean highlands, now in northern Peru. His conquistador captors, led by Francisco Pizarro, had just decided he must die. During the nine months or so of his... Continue Reading →
Cloud islands, they are called. The peaks of the Usumbara Mountains in Tanzania rise so high that fogs form on their slopes where the cool mountain air meets warmer currents rising off the sea. The climate has created a unique ecosystem, as real islands do, and much of the wildlife is unique to the area.... Continue Reading →
For the first English translation of his most influential work, The Description of Africa, he is John Leo. His baptismal name was Joannes Leone de Medici, although he preferred its Arabic form, Yuhannah al-Asad. His birth name was al-Hasan Ibn Muhammad Ibn Ahmad al-Wazzan. But he is best known as Leo Africanus. His date of... Continue Reading →
The small archipelago of St Kilda, fifty miles west of Harris, has long attracted romantic attention for its remoteness, with the sense of deep strangeness and difference such remoteness implies. It is the last and outmost isle, the island on the edge of the world: a place whose way of life, in the words of... Continue Reading →
At their peak, early in the 19th century, there were some 262,427 of them across Britain’s naval and merchant fleets. People called them Jacks, but they are nameless mostly. Or nameless to history. Even on surviving musters, their identities can be hidden behind pseudonyms. Some of these – George Million or Jacob Blackbeard, say –... Continue Reading →
On Christmas Eve, 1789, HMS Guardian found itself in the shadow of two great icebergs some 1,300 miles south-east of the Cape of Good Hope. The ship’s captain, 29-year-old Edward Riou, ordered a double watch be kept, but, engulfed in fog and with darkness falling, the Guardian struck one all the same. The collision tore... Continue Reading →
Mathew Lyons 