European history
The merchant as global reporter
Joad Raymond Wren explores the role played by Europe’s polyglot traders in disseminating news before the invention of the telegraph
Vampires, werewolves and Sami sorcerers
Animism, divination and shape-shifting witchcraft continued to be powerful forces in the Baltic long after the conversion of Europe to Christianity
The pointlessness of the German Peasants’ War – except in Marxist ideology
The short-lived 16th-century revolt resolved absolutely nothing, but it loomed large in Engels’s thought and in the official DDR interpretation of history
There’s nothing shameful about hypochondria
Caroline Crampton describes the real agonies of people obsessed with their fragility, revealing that her own hypochondria stems from a childhood cancer diagnosis
A proud, independent spirit
‘Deplorable,’ wrote the historian Denis Sinor in 1958 about the state of Hungarian historiography in English. ‘Not only are the…
From nomads to emperors
This is the best of times to be writing history, since so much of what has been taken for granted,…
The tyrant of Tirana
For many in the West, Albania remains as remote and shadowy as the fictional Syldavia of the Tintin comics. The…
Migration in Europe is the ripple effect of the second world war
Two words may pique the reader’s interest on the cover of this timely, panoramic history of Europe by the distinguished…
Simplicius Simplicissimus and the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War
On 23 May 1618, Bohemian Protestants pushed two Catholic governors and their secretary through the windows of Prague Castle, in…
The same old song
T.S. Eliot liked to recall the time he was recognised by his London taxi driver. Surprised, he told the cabbie…
