The biggest problem with studying history is remembering that the people taking part in it didn’t know what was going to happen next.  And there is another problem as well – they often didn’t know accurately what had happened before either.  People’s motivations are often therefore hard to fathom.  And the existence of conspiracy

I have become a bit embarrassed by the amount of interest my post about the trial of Galileo has generated.  It was a very quick and not particularly thought out piece that I just knocked out in half an hour or so in response to a Pious Fabrication’s video.   But it has been the most read

  Have you ever had two tabs open on your browser and found an unexpected connection between the pages?  Here’s a thing. Is there something relating these two?  In one there is a story about conservative Anglicans in London who have come up with a great wheeze.  They have set up an organisation called the Southwark

Soviet communism was a failure.  In particular, it failed by the most basic of measures.  You wouldn’t want to live there.  By the time it ended just about everyone was fed up of it and it has subsequently had few mourners.  Certainly nobody is likely to get very far trying to bring it back. But

A common sight on the streets of Rome in the late empire was abandoned children.  The economy was in a bad way.  Taxes were rising.  Many parents simply gave up the struggle of trying to cope with another mouth to feed.  It is a harrowing thought to think of the suffering involved, both on the

This huge book was also a huge success when it came out.  There was a time when it was a common sight on buses and trains, and every bookshop in Britain had it in stock.  In the seventies and eighties it seemed perfectly obvious that everyone was interested in the working class so a long