British history

Set in a silver sea: the glory of Britain’s islands

14 October 2023 9:00 am

Alice Albinia reminds us that Orkney was a trading station long before London, Iona the epicentre of Celtic Christianity and Shetland a haven for liberal Udal law

In praise of Birmingham, Britain’s maligned second city

27 August 2022 9:00 am

During my gap year in 1981, I worked on the 24th floor of Birmingham’s Alpha Tower for the Regional Manpower…

Why was Henrietta Maria, Charles I’s beautiful wife, so reviled?

20 August 2022 9:00 am

On 15 June 1645, as Thomas Fairfax’s soldiers picked over the scattered debris on the Naseby battlefield, they made a…

It’s thrilling to learn that the rebellious Urien actually existed

13 August 2022 9:00 am

Once, when we shared the same history teacher in our teens, my older brother Dominic handed in an essay about…

The Victorian origins of ‘medieval’ folklore

18 June 2022 9:00 am

I would guess that contemporary pagans have a love-hate relationship with Ronald Hutton. With books such as The Triumph of…

Brother against brother in the English civil war

28 May 2022 9:00 am

‘The Wars of the Three Kingdoms’ is the best description of the devastating conflict that erupted in England, Ireland and…

How Charles II sought to obliterate a decade of British history

9 April 2022 9:00 am

When the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy, in the person of that ‘lovely black boy’ Charles II, was announced in…

With Elizabeth Stuart as monarch, might the English civil war have been avoided?

27 November 2021 9:00 am

Many girls dream about their favourite princesses. Elizabeth Stuart, a princess herself, took this fantasy a step further and modelled…

How fears of popery led to a century of turmoil in ‘the land of fallen angels’

20 November 2021 9:00 am

Stuart England did not do its anti-Catholicism by halves. In the late 1670s and early 1680s, a popular feature of…

Has George III been seriously maligned?

23 October 2021 9:00 am

Americans regard George III as a power-crazed petty tyrant – but he was the very opposite, says Kate Maltby

The delicate business of monitoring the monarchy

9 October 2021 9:00 am

This very readable account of relations between the British intelligence services and the Crown does more than it says on…

What does it really mean to feel English?

10 April 2021 9:00 am

Referring to the precarious future of the Union of England and Scotland, the authors of Englishness: The Political Force Transforming…

Not all British memsahibs were racist snobs

4 May 2019 9:00 am

Despite efforts to prevent them, British women formed a part of the Indian empire almost from the start. Although the…

The Gordon Riots, illustrated in Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge

The stubborn old Hanoverians saw new Gunpowder Plots everywhere

19 May 2018 9:00 am

Once won, rights and freedoms are taken for granted. We all find it difficult to imagine life before the Married…

William Cavendish, 1st Duke of Newcastle, performing volte, with Bolsover Castle in the background. (Painting after Abraham Jansz. van Diepenbeeck). Bryant is particularly severe on the subject of racing and horse breeding

Bryant’s tyrants: Chris Bryant bashes the British aristocracy

16 December 2017 9:00 am

I rashly discarded this book’s dustjacket when I received it, and thus saw only the unlettered cover, a faded photograph…

When posters told us our place

29 March 2014 9:00 am

As a sign of the way things have changed, nothing could better this. Hester Vaizey, Cambridge history don and ‘publishing…

Anne Boleyn’s last secret

17 August 2013 9:00 am

Why was the queen executed with a sword, rather than an axe?