History & Knowledge

In June 1947 Kenneth Arnold was flying a small plane over Mount Rainier in Washington when nine bright objects began tracking him at high speed. People have always seen signs and wonders in the skies, but once Arnold identified these things as ‘saucer-like’, he inaugurated the age of the UFO. Over the following decades, countless people in the United States …

Towards the end of Prospero’s Books, Peter Greenaway’s 1991 reimagining of The Tempest, John Gielgud moves through a shifting landscape of half-naked, androgynous bodies. Staring directly at the camera, he gravely intones his final speech as the scene behind him dissolves. Deliciously baroque, searingly self-aware and dripping in Elizabethan glamour, Greenaway’s film discovers a radical queerness hitherto hidden at the …

Flipping the Script: How a French-Themed Festival Reimagined the Normans Earlier this year, a small town near me hosted a weekend festival with a charming French theme. The event was a delightful blend of French cuisine, music, dancing, and family games. While the festival lacked a direct historical angle, it featured an unexpected highlight: a group of medieval re-enactors portraying …

For thousands of years, it was widely accepted that humans occupied a special, central position in the universe. This confidence began to wane when Nicolaus Copernicus proposed that the Earth revolves around the Sun, introducing an exciting yet unsettling question: could life exist on other planets? For French astronomer Jérôme Lalande, the answer was obvious. He argued that just as …

Catherine de’ Medici: The Life and Times of the Serpent Queen by Mary Hollingsworth ★★★ “Flames leapt up onto the roofs.” Catherine de’ Medici is considered by many modern historians as the ultimate ‘histrionic woman’ of the Renaissance. But is she the only reason why civil society in France fell apart after 1560? Mary Hollingsworth tells a comprehensive story of …