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Christmas Lies and Legends

Is Santa really Dutch? Were Christmas Trees introduced by Prince Albert? Was Christmas once a time of faith, rather than riotous feasting?

England’s Unwanted Reformation

Most English people initially saw the Reformation as an unexpected catastrophe, wrenching their religious lives out of shape, and stripping their communities of resources they had naively believed belonged to them.

Russian Piano Masterpieces: Rachmaninov

Rachmaninov is considered by many to be the greatest composer-pianist in history. But his very popularity has left the complexity and subtlety of his music underappreciated.

Plato

Plato the Athenian was the philosopher who founded the Academy and whose brilliant writings are the foundation texts of the entire western philosophical tradition.

Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobites

Charles Edward Stuart (‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’) is one of the most recognisable and romanticised figures of British history. Born in Rome as a Catholic prince on 31 December 1720, he led the Jacobite Rising of 1745, which came closer than anyone expected to changing Great Britain irrevocably.

Russian Piano Masterpieces: Musorgsky

Musorgsky was a proficient, but not virtuosic pianist, and most of his piano music is comprised of unambitious salon pieces. On the basis of these modest exploits, no one could have predicted his Pictures at an Exhibition.

William And Mary: The Court Divided

Like James I, King William III was fundamentally unhappy with the stuffy formality of England’s vast crumbling royal estate. But unlike James, who virtually abandoned Edinburgh, William maintained a second court, and a parallel suite of royal houses, in the Netherlands.

Hippocrates and Ancient Greek Medicine

The birth of rational medicine contributed to the scientific revolution which occurred amongst eastern Greek communities in the 7th-to-5th centuries BCE.

War Games at the Field of the Cloth of Gold

2020 marks the 500th anniversary of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, one of the most extraordinary diplomatic events of the late medieval period.

Choosing Religious Atrocities in Ireland

Nowhere in Europe have the wars of religion lasted longer than in Ireland. At the heart of this are two rival sets of memories of atrocities: above all, Protestants recall the massacres of the 1641 rebellion, and Catholics recall the massacres perpetrated by Oliver Cromwell in 1649.

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