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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.

Snow White: Evil Witches

The Brothers Grimm’s tale of Snow White has been retold dozens of times in print and the cinema over the past two centuries. A central character is the Evil Queen, Snow White’s malevolent stepmother, who tries to kill her with the help of the occult.

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.

John Evelyn: Britain’s First Environmentalist

Air pollution, the usefulness of trees, ideas for a green belt are not concerns we associate with the 1600s. But John Evelyn, writer, diarist and gardener, was unusual. His thinking in Fumifugium (1661) about air quality, and Sylva (1664) about trees, seems astonishingly close to our own today.

Convincing Fiction: Daniel Defoe to Ishiguro and Knausgaard

How does fiction make itself seem like fact? Professor John Mullan begins where novels begin: with Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, which showed every novel that followed how to make a ‘strange surprising’ story seem entirely ‘probable’ (the word that eighteenth-century pioneers of fiction liked t

The Windrush Thinkers and Artists

London in the 1950s and 60s was a crucible in which West Indian writers, artists, thinkers and scholars imagined new futures for the Caribbean, Britain and the world.

Silence, and the Dynamising of African Creative Resistance

In the face of enslavement, colonialism and cultural suppression, peoples of African descent have fought to maintain cherished cultural practices.

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.

Offensive Shakespeare

From The Merchant of Venice to The Taming of the Shrew, it’s easy to see how Shakespeare’s plays can cause offence to contemporary audiences. Is it harder to teach Shakespeare today than in the past? Have ideas about what is offensive in Shakespeare changed over time?

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.

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