Execution

Victims of a cruel prejudice: the last two men to be executed for sodomy in England

10 February 2024 9:00 am

Chris Bryant describes in painful detail how James Pratt and John Smith, working-class men from the Midlands, fell foul of the ‘bloodthirsty English justice system’ in 1835

The men of blood get their comeuppance in Revolutionary France

28 August 2021 9:00 am

Colin Jones’s hour-by-hour reconstruction of the fall of Maximilien Robespierre, the French revolutionary most associated with the Terror, is inspired…

Têtes coupées by Théodore Géricault, 1818

From head-shrinking to skull-seeking: a history of the severed head

15 November 2014 9:00 am

A severed head, argues Frances Larson in her sprightly new book, is ‘simultaneously a person and a thing… an apparently…

Terrorists still can't 'execute' anyone

21 June 2014 9:00 am

During the sudden advances of ISIS in Iraq, one visual image stood for their brutality. As the Daily Mail reported…