Jenny Uglow

Orchid Frenzy

The discovery of a Brazilian orchid with huge red-and-purple flowers in the early nineteenth century set off a mania for the exotic plants in Victorian England.

Lunar Myths and Mysteries

Two new books explore our growing scientific understanding of the moon as well as its powerful appeal to the imagination.

Hallelujah!

In his book Every Valley, Charles King explains the enduring appeal of Handel’s Messiah since its premiere in Dublin nearly three hundred years ago.

The Legacy of Red Vienna

From 1919 to 1934, socialist Vienna was guided by the “critical rationalism” and the pluralist, collaborative ethos of its thinkers and planners, whose influence endured long after they lost power.

Worms’ Work

For five thousand years there has been no shortage of uses for silk, from Genghis Khan’s undershirts to nerve repair.

The Volcano Lovers

For travelers in the Romantic period, Mount Vesuvius was an object of scientific curiosity, a political allegory, and a touchstone of the sublime.

In Search of the Rare and Strange

In Dürer’s Lost Masterpiece, Ulinka Rublack traces the global connections of the merchants who were the creative agents of the European art market in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

‘A Haughty Independence’

The early-twentieth-century painter Gwen John struggled to forge her own place in an art world dominated by men.

Shifting Sands

Who was responsible for the wrecking of the Royal Navy warship Gloucester in 1682, and why did it provoke so much political controversy?

Fascism’s Poster Girl

Edda Mussolini was once considered “the most dangerous woman in Europe,” but did she have real political power?

Hilary Mantel (1952–2022)

Hilary Mantel’s novels and short stories demonstrated that while the historical record can tell us what people did, only fiction can imagine what they felt and thought.

Silences and Scars

Two new books on Berlin track the city through decades of growth, economic desperation, artistic innovation, Nazi terror, political division, and reunification.

Lear’s Lyrical Coasts

The seascapes that Edward Lear sketched on his travels around the Mediterranean are thresholds and boundaries that ask: To stay, or go?

Out of His Element

In a new selection of John James Audubon’s oceangoing writings, we sense his obsessive quest to draw every bird he saw, even though he disliked being on the water.

A Master of Ambiguity

Hans Holbein evoked his subjects with uncanny verisimilitude, but leaves us to guess at his opinions of them.

Europe’s Great Emporium

Sixteenth-century Antwerp was alive with entrepreneurial merchants, rapacious moneylenders, whispering spies, and heretical ideas.

Veronese Preserv’d

Napoleon’s Greatest Trophy

How a Venetian masterpiece ended up in the Louvre.

Contagious Constitutions

Linda Colley shows in her new book that written constitutions developed both as a means of shoring up entrenched rulers and of turning successful rebellions into legitimate governments.

The Reader of Rocks

William Smith’s innovative use of the fossil record helped him create the first detailed geological map of England, Wales, and Scotland.