Nowadays Dante Alighieri is primarily remembered as the author of the Divine Comedy, but there was a lot more to him than that. Politician and poet, he ended his life in exile from a city which he had once ruled. He elevated the language of…

The 19th century was a time of turmoil in Europe, as the fallout from the shock of the French Revolution and the realization that real social change was possible continued to reverberate through the continent. Many people responded to this…

Fame is a fleeting thing. Someone can be a celebrity in their own time but give it a few decades and if they’re remembered at all it’s usually only for a single aspect of their lives. Newton revolutionised mathematics and ran the Royal…

Nature versus nurture is one of the oldest debates there is. Are we predetermined to become who we become, or is it the world we encounter that shapes us into who we are? The story of David (”Tiger”) Roche and Boyle Roche seems almost…

The cliched idea of the “thin line between genius and insanity” is one that has been discussed by both psychiatrists, cultural commentators and pop psychologists for decades. In one sense it’s an iteration of the “tortured artist”…

It speaks a lot to the integrity of a justice system when it finds somebody innocent based on the evidence, even when all involved are convinced of his guilt. The jury in Chester Burge’s trial for murder had every reason to find him guilty.…

Laskarina Bouboulina was born in chains, both figuratively and (in a way) literally. She was conceived during one of her mother’s conjugal visits to her father in a prison in Istanbul and was born nine months later in May of 1771. Her…

The story of the abolition of slavery in America is a long and tortuous one. Like many such stories it has its heroes and its villains. One group that almost always fell on the right side of history was the Society of Friends, better known…

The American frontier was a place of legends, tall tales and wild stories. But among these stories were true tales of extreme human endurance and courage in the face of extreme conditions. One such story became a legend in its own right,…

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…