• The End of the 20th Century?

    Professor Jo Crotty Following the death of her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth, and former General Secretary of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, just a week before, it feels as if the 20th century has finally come to an end. Like me, people may have been prompted by the former to watch (or in my case…

  • Cry God for Harry, England, and St. George?

    Dr Roger Spalding Until relatively recently St George’s day, 23rd April passed by relatively unnoticed except for hardcore ‘patriots’ and Morris dancers. Yet recently there have been attempts to elevate this holiday to that of St Patrick’s day on 17th March. Historically St George rather withered as the English did not need an emblematic saintly…

  • ‘A Whiff of Munich’?

    Roger Spalding Neville Chamberlain holds the paper signed by both Hitler and himself on his return from Munich. I often read in applicants’ personal statements that they wish to study History to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. This is sadly, something that rarely occurs; humanity appears to have an infinite capacity to repeat…

  • Pandemics, Prohibition and the Past: COVID-19 in Historical Perspective

    The Coronavirus epidemic may be without precedent in living memory, but global pandemics are nothing new. In the sixth century AD the ‘Plague of Justinian’, an outbreak of bubonic plague, killed around 25 million people in Europe and Asia. The best known pandemic, the ‘Black Death’ of 1348-9, is thought to have killed up to…