We don’t know as much about history as we like to think we do sometimes. For example, almost our entire knowledge of the druids of ancient Britain comes from the writings of the Romans who quite thoroughly suppressed them. How much of what…

Piracy has been used throughout history as a tool of state policy. Giving free reign to brigands to attack civilian merchants from an enemy kingdom is definitely one way to weaken your enemy and enrich yourself, though one that does seem…

Marriage is a tricky business, even in a legal sense. Victorian law treated the wife as the servant of the husband, which among other things meant that a wife killing her husband was (up until 1828) actually guilty of “petty treason” and…

Sequels are always a tricky prospect, especially to a film that was as much of a pop culture phenomenon as The Matrix. The Wachowski siblings had come, seemingly out of nowhere, with a bold thinker’s action movie; a film that combined the…

To quote the great Terry Pratchett, people always seem to have a “little blank spot in their heads where someone had written: Kings. What a good idea.” Even in modern times, when we fool ourselves into thinking we’ve moved on from this, you…

There’s nothing that epitomises the attitudes of pre-Revolutionary France quite like the job of executioner. The men in this job served the royal will, dealing out death and torture as decreed by the upper classes. Officially they were…

Can videogames be art? It seems like ten years ago that was all that you needed to say online in order to kick off an instant argument, one which usually broke down into a debate over the definition of “art”. Nowadays it’s generally agreed…

“Journalism”, as a concept, is an entirely new development of the last several centuries. Before the printing press led to mass literacy and the desire for “news”, there was no need for people to go and find it out. Over time it evolved,…

We live in an increasingly interconnected world. A friend may live on the other side of the planet, and yet their words appear on your computer screen to tell you how their day is going. You can pick up your phone and chat to people on…

Lives are rarely defined by a single event, but memories of them often are. Margaret Brown was a woman who became best known as “the Unsinkable Molly Brown”, after she was one of the most high-profile survivors of the Titanic disaster. In…