Introduction: The stately homes and England -- Prelude: Houses of taste (to 1815) -- 1. The Victorian idea of heritage -- 2. Hosts and guests: the opening of the country house -- 3. Philistines, ...

Are you an optimist or a pessimist? To some eyes the recent torrent of television programmes and best-selling books about history is a sign of social health. It reflects expanded educational ...

Noel Malcolm reviews The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair by Peter Mandler Of course we all know that there's no such thing as 'national character'.

The problem the 20th century had with Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help was that the conjunction of ‘self’ and ‘help’ sounded too much like the opposite of the welfare state. Smiles’s creed, it was assumed, ...

In 1947, Mickey Spillane (1918–2006) unleashed his hyperbolic private eye and WWII vet, Mike Hammer, on the world with I, the Jury, a revenge saga that featured a major infusion Continue reading » The ...

Peter Frankopan brings his history of ties across Asia into the present while Maya Jasanoff, winner of the world's richest history prize, uses the novels of Joseph Conrad to show that the novelist was ...

New ways of understanding the past. By linking context and ideas, we can negotiate the present and plan the future Show more Peter Frankopan brings his history of ties across Asia into the present ...