BBC History Magazine

“ ‘I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too.’ Elizabeth I’s speech at Tilbury, in the face of the Spanish navy, is one of the best-known episodes in English history. B

The Little Ice Age fascinates me as a vignette of people adapting to constantly changing climate conditions over several centuries. And they had no weather forecasts, nor central heating either! Brian reveals how the lives of Britons were transforme

The start of a new decade is always a time for reflection, and what a crucial decade the 2020s will be. We now live in the Anthropocene, the human-made geological epoch that will leave its mark forever on our world, and the next 10 years will determi

There is a sub-genre of English literature known as Tasmanian gothic. It consists of sensationalist novels, such as Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life, set in the penal colonies of the Australian island that until 1856 was known as Van

The Christmas 2019 issue of BBC History Magazine was excellent, with lots of interesting, thought-provoking articles. The highlight for me was Will Bowden’s After the Empire. I wonder if this article could be made compulsory reading for the so-called

Editor Rob Attar robertattar@historyextra.com World history editor Matt Elton mattelton@historyextra.com Production editor Spencer Mizen Section editors Ellie Cawthorne and Jon Bauckham Picture editor Samantha Nott samnott@historyextra.com Deput

What was life like as a history student in Switzerland? I wasn’t exactly a model school student – I spent a great deal of time in detention, so when I announced my decision to go to university, my family and friends found it rather amusing. But once

Ellie Cawthorne: In 1726, a woman named Mary Toft perpetrated an extraordinary hoax that lasted several weeks and captured the imagination of the British public. What did it involve? Karen Harvey: Essentially, Mary Toft claimed to have given birth

“In 1902, Australia became the first country in the world where some women won full political equality – that is, the right to vote and stand for parliament. But my book, You Daughters of Freedom, is also about what Australian women did next. After t

At the end of his 2016 book Imperial  Triumph, Michael Kulikowski highlighted that different ethnic groups – classified as ‘barbarians’ – had been settling within the Roman empire since the first century AD. As the Vindolanda tablets record, many of

Virginia Woolf first looked at flats in Mecklenburgh Square in 1915 but, horrified by a room “disfigured horribly with velvet curtains, gigantic purple cushions and the usual swarm of gilt & lemon coloured objects”, retreated to Days Library. Shortly

In this ambitious study, Julie Peakman examines how sex, gender and empire interacted in imperial contact zones that range from the first ‘New World’ of the Americas to Polynesia and Oceania, Africa, post-colonial America and the Caribbean, India, th

David McCullough is a two-times Pulitzer prize-winner and the bestselling biographer of John Adams and Harry Truman. In 2005 he wrote a groundbreaking book about the 17 months between King George III’s declaration of war on his American subjects in O

There comes a time in women’s lives when, often unexpectedly, they start fanning themselves over their morning coffees, worrying about forgetting people’s names, and, once the shock has worn off, calculating how much money they are saving through not

Interpretations of the past are always shaped by the politics and interests of their creators and the cultural moment of their production. Hence, this lengthy account of Britain’s First World War by Simon Heffer focuses on political turmoil, intrigue

A gifted orator and statesman who escaped slavery to become a national leader of the US abolitionist movement, Frederick Douglass became famous in the 19th century as a result of his speeches and writing. This Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, newly

When did you first hear about Macmillan? I first became interested in politics when I was about 18, so it was around that time. He was already a figure of some repute when I was a graduate at Oxford University in the early 1950s. He’d been a Conserva

Harold Macmillan (1894–1986), dubbed ‘Supermac’, was leader of the Conservative party and Britain’s prime minister from 1957–63. Born in London and educated at Eton and Oxford, he served with distinction in the Grenadier Guards in the First World War