WRITER & HISTORIAN
“All I desire is fame,” wrote Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, in the preface to her first book, a collection of poetry, in 1653. “Fame is nothing but a great noise… therefore I wish my book may set a-work every tongue.” As a statement of the workings of celebrity it is remarkably modern. But it... 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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
It was Anne Greene’s great good fortune that, after she had been hanged in the castle yard at Oxford, her body was given to the university’s physicians for dissection. In the summer of 1650, Anne, aged 22, had been seduced by Geoffrey Read, the teenage grandson of her employer Sir Thomas Read at the manor... Continue Reading →
Founded in the early 17th century, the west African kingdom of Dahomey was a bellicose, expansionist state. It is said the king’s primary duty was to ‘make Dahomey always larger’; one 18th-century king, Agaju, boasted that – whereas his grandfather had conquered two countries, his father 18, and his brother, who took the throne before... Continue Reading →
By the autumn of 1895, Edith Lanchester was 24. Born into a prosperous middle-class family, she had studied at London University and Birkbeck and was earning her own living as a clerk at the Cardiff (New South Wales) Gold Mining Company. She was also was already a seasoned socialist campaigner whose ringing voice, it was... Continue Reading →
The way George Soper told it, it might have been a case for Sherlock Holmes. “The typhoid epidemic that broke out in the Summer home of Mr George Thompson at Oyster Bay was a puzzling affair,” he told the New York Times. It was 1906 and typhoid was rampant in the city; nearly 700 died... 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 →
The problem with theosophy, WB Yeats said, was that its followers wanted to turn a good philosophy into a bad religion. Its founder, Madame Blavatsky, seems to have agreed. “There are about half a dozen real theosophists in the world,” she told the poet. “And one of those is stupid.” Whatever Blavatsky herself could be... Continue Reading →
Even at the very beginning, their affair was barely private. He joked about it in his lectures and wrote love songs about her that were sung far and wide. But they were both, in their own way, already famous. By the 1110s, Peter Abelard was in his thirties, with a fast-growing reputation as a philosopher... Continue Reading →
Extinction is an old fact but a new idea. In the early 19th century its certainty was barely established. How many people, then, had the anatomical knowledge and geological expertise to identify extinct species – that is, creatures whose final form was largely unknown – and pull their fossils out of the rock whole? In... Continue Reading →
Few, if any, historians have been so high born as Anna Komnene, first daughter of the Byzantine emperor Alexios I, who came into the world in the porphyry-lined room of the Palace of Boukoleon, overlooking the harbour of Constantinople and the Sea of Marmara, on December 1 1083. Alexios had seized the imperial throne from... 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 →
On November 9, 1928 Bow Street Magistrates Court was crowded. DH Lawrence’s The Rainbow had been successfully prosecuted for obscenity in the same courtroom 13 years earlier. Now it was the turn of The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall. The perceived obscenity in Hall’s book was its subject matter: it presents lesbianism – inversion... Continue Reading →
The visions began when Hildegard of Bingen was young – perhaps as young as three. But unlike many mystical religious experiences, the visions did not come in dreams or ecstatic states; ecstasy, she thought, was a defect. They came like a cloud of light inside her on which forms and shadows moved while her eyes... Continue Reading →
Ahilyabai Holkar, queen of the Malwa kingdom in north-west central India, part of the Maratha empire, died on 13 August 1795, having reigned for nearly thirty years. She came to power in 1767 after the deaths of her father in law, Malhar Rao Holkar, and her young, sickly son. (Her husband had died in battle... Continue Reading →
On the night of September 25 1828, a small group of armed men approached the presidential palace in Bogotá. Inside, Simón Bolívar lay in bed asleep beside his mistress, Manuela Sáenz. Bolívar – known as El Liberator – had led large parts of South America to freedom from imperial Spain, but his increasingly autocratic, anti-republican... Continue Reading →
Mathew Lyons 