Britain

What are stars made of? When a young astronomer upset standard explanations for the formation of the solar system, the establishment told her she was wrong – then stole her findings.

Despite their reputation, London’s private members’ clubs have never been entirely for men.

An old-fashioned feature of a fusty, inegalitarian past, when did the British stop knowing their place?

Bluestockings: The First Women’s Movement by Susannah Gibson makes a case for 18th-century proto-feminism. Do the Bluestockings fit?

In the era of the early modern ‘secret state’, two notorious brothers set up an elaborate intelligence network, managing a vast array of spies and informers watchful for Jacobite plots against Britain.

The 18th century was the age of graffiti, when the writing on the wall turned political.

In Rites of Passage: Death & Mourning in Victorian Britain, Judith Flanders explores the commercialisation of grief and those who resisted the era’s conspicuous consumption.

Mutiny and murder at sea ended in capture for the crew of the pirate ship Revenge. Their trial was a deliberate display of the authority of the British state. How did it unfold?

General elections in Britain were once weeks-long affairs of corruption and chaos. The shift to one-day polling was slow.