by James Geary When did human beings start changing the environment? It’s a difficult question, since the further back in time you go the less reliable the evidence becomes. But thanks to new technologies and a new breed of innovative archeologist, the answers are becoming a little clearer. The emerging […]
by Andrew Phillips and Patrick Hunt The authors of this article are amusingly inspired by the coincidence that in 1572 one of the Masters of Shakespeare’s Stratford Grammar School (King’s New School) was Simon Hunt and that the will of a fellow actor named Augustine Phillips bequeathed the Bard thirty […]
by Patrick Hunt Historical linguistics often surprises us about how old are some of the words we use today, especially when we might expect they were coined only within the last century or so. While some of these old words, either commonplace like “star” and “myth”, or not so common […]
by Melissa Guertin Edvard Munch may not now be screaming over his work’s repeated purloinings (1995, 2004) from several museums, since they’ve been returned, but Isabella Stewart Gardner should be turning over in her grave because the 1990 heist of twelve masterpieces from her lovely Boston palazzo museum is still […]
By Patrick Hunt Truffles can drive people to do funny things. Moliere’s 1664 Tartuffe, a farce about fraud, may not actually explain an iota of trufflemania. The word ‘truffle’ is an esteemed word, uttered almost religiously except to those who are suspicious of its devotees and only see the earthy […]
By Andrew Herkovic The ancient Library of Alexandria, real as it once was, is essentially the stuff of myth. What we usually understand as libraries, even the most ambitious of libraries, don’t much resemble the myth or the reality of the original at the shore of the Mediterranean. Though it […]
By Danny Wood Three brothers, Danny, Ben and Sam Wood, search for archaeological traces of Hannibal, the Carthaginian warrior, as they cycle his two thousand mile trail from Spain to Tunisia, for a BBC Television documentary We’d just finished riding up the Tourmalet, known as one of the toughest Tour […]