Reality turns out not to be what it seems. I have a feeling that there was never a time when people who thought about it actually believed that the Earth was flat. But we have certainly believed lots of things that are equally untrue since we evolved brains that had the capability to ponder these

  The Holy Roman Empire gets written out of European history to a large extent.  This is despite having been founded by Charlemagne and ended by Napoleon and having played a big part in the history of wide chunks of Europe in between.

In Victorian Britain married women were firmly under the control of men.  They were obliged to be obedient to their husbands and could not own property independent of him.  Okay it sounds great in theory, but how did it actually work?

  I am interested in politics, but I don’t follow the day to day political coverage very much. I do have the occasional binge. I get caught up sometimes in a big story like an election or a big scandal. But this is pretty much like someone who has got their eating disorder under control

We’ve all got used to social media and communicating over the internet. We instinctively know what the real meaning of a lot of communications are.  You can tell that an email or a message on Twitter is not genuine even without reading the whole thing. But put yourself in the place of an historian looking

  You can’t doubt Mary beard’s academic credentials, but she has written SPQR for the general reader. She starts the story with Cicero and the Cataline conspiracy. We get the characters involved and we get a description of what the world the action is taking place in looked like. This is history as entertainment, and