Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2024 i History Extra

“England's first trade mission to Mughal India wasn't a great success” INDIA HAS JUST CLINCHED A LANDMARK DEAL with the European Free Trade Association, which it says will result in some tens of billions of pounds of investment in the country. Prime minister Narendra Modi, whose Bharatiya Janata Party is currently campaigning for a third term in power, has called it a “watershed moment”. Meanwhile, trade discussions between India and the UK – after 14 separate rounds of talks – are frozen. The much-talked-of deal, particularly important in the post-Brexit landscape, doesn't seem likely to happen before the next UK general election. One cannot help thinking – at this moment in time – that the deal is perhaps more important to Britain than India. Reading about the talks made me…

1 The mother of sex scandals Adultery accusations made against the prime minister led to a change in Britain's custody laws In 1827, 19-year-old Caroline Sheridan, granddaughter of the famous playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, married George Norton, heir to his family's fortune. It was a disastrous match. George turned down work while waiting for his inheritance, so the family became dependent on Caroline's earnings as a poet and novelist. George drank and was often violent towards his wife. All the while, Caroline's flamboyance and literary flair was attracting some powerful admirers, including a future prime minister, Lord Melbourne. In April 1836, after yet another heated argument, George barred Caroline from the family home and prevented her from seeing their three sons, all aged less than seven. In the early 19th…

On 19 November 1316, a four-day-old baby died. This was not an unusual occurrence in medieval France, but the loss of this particular infant was a constitutional disaster as well as a personal tragedy. That's because he was King John I, the last in the unbroken father-son Capetian line that had ruled France for more than three centuries. This was, as Justine Firnhaber-Baker tells us in her superb account of the rise, apogee and fall of the Capetian line, “the beginning of an era's end” for the dynasty. This is Firnhaber-Baker's first foray into writing popular history, and one can only hope that there will be many more. The breadth and depth of her research are evident throughout, yet the narrative zings along at an enjoyable and very readable pace.…

Books about the gulag have overwhelmingly focused on excavating the stories of those imprisoned in the Soviet Union's vast labour camp system from the 1930s to the 1950s. Or, they have set about uncovering the individuals responsible for the suffering of the incarcerated. Dan Healey's new book, however, places at the centre of its attention a constituency that cannot be so easily categorised as either victims or perpetrators: those charged with offering the prisoners medical care. Some were prisoners themselves, fortunate to be assigned work as hospital orderlies, before going on to build medical skills that saved them from far deadlier work elsewhere within the camps. Many were freshly graduated doctors and nurses despatched by the state to work in remote labour camps. Some of these were naïve and eager…

Battle-weary medieval kings, eminent Victorian architects and some of Britain's greatest artistic treasures have all passed below Muncaster Castle's imposing walls during its long and distinguished lifetime. Built from distinctive red stone, and boasting a 14th-century peel tower, the castle today emanates power and permanence from its perch on the western edge of the Lake District. Yet it has seen successive waves of change – and borne witness to some of the most remarkable episodes in British history – since it first appeared in the Cumbrian landscape in the Middle Ages. The castle, which has been owned (and occupied) by the Pennington family since 1208 (perhaps earlier), was originally built as a defence against Scottish raids into northwest England. So it began life as an austere fortress on the frontline…

Across 1 Regicide 5 Sousa 9 Bruce 10 Suetonius 11 Rosa Parks 12 Munda 13 Sparta 15 Paul Nash 17 Marianne 19 Rocket 22 Gupta 24 Clothilde 26 Allotment 27 Aisne 28 Anson 29 Matthias Down 1 Roberts 2 Gauls 3 Cleopatra 4/5 Desert Storm 6 Union Jack 7 Ansbach 8 Telstar 14 Acropolis 16 Lionheart 17 Magdala 18 Necker 20 Theseus 21 Rostra 23 Acton 25 Laski Four winners of Alexandria by Islam Issa: Adrian Howells, Huntingdon; Suzan Allen, London; S Shurman, Leominster; Nik Jorgensen, Blackburn CROSSWORD COMPETITION TERMS & CONDITIONS ● The crossword competition is open to all residents of the UK (& Channel Islands), aged 18 or over, except Immediate Media Company London Limited employees or contractors, and anyone connected with the competition or their direct family…

1. Moving pictures In this month's Explore piece I was interested to discover that several notable artworks – including Van Gogh's Sunflowers – were spirited out of London to Muncaster Castle to keep them safe during the Second World War (page 84). 2. Captive audiences I was fascinated to learn, in our piece on Beethoven, that a group of German PoWs performed his Ninth Symphony in a Japanese camp during the First World War (page 39). 3. Fast show Attendees of this year's recent Academy Awards might be as surprised as I was to learn that the first incarnation of the Oscars, in 1929, lasted just 15 minutes (page 8).…

I love a good conspiracy theory, and enjoyed the way Rob Attar explored the reasons they are so prevalent (March). I think it's human nature to want closure – and if we can't have that, we would rather be part of the secret societies that cause the greatest mysteries of our times. After all, it's uncomfortable not knowing: maybe part of our brains sparks an alarm that whirs ‘Danger, strange event! Get to the bottom of it, before they get you!’ Maybe history has something to do with it, too – our fascination with ancient Egypt, for example. Their lives and beliefs seem so otherworldly that we can't help but be enthralled by their secrets. I recall watching a documentary about a recent discovery of a tomb, in which the…

The symphony bursts into life Theater am Kärntnertor, Vienna, Austrian empire 7 MAY 1824 When Ludwig van Beethoven completed his Ninth Symphony in the early months of 1824, he gave voice to humanity's desire to make order out of chaos, to overcome division, and to create joy through brotherhood. Over his lifetime, the wars and revolutions that shook Europe had transformed politics – and now the composer wanted to offer a cultural transformation through his music. Beethoven had first begun writing his last, great masterpiece – the world's first choral symphony – after receiving a commission from London's Philharmonic Society in the November of 1822. But although London had commissioned the work, admirers in Vienna published an open letter calling for Beethoven to premiere the symphony there instead. Vienna was…

Danny Bird: You've written a rich and fascinating history of Africa spanning a vast sweep of cultures, regions, personalities and centuries. Did you seek out any particular stories or narratives in preparation for this book? Zeinab Badawi: When I set about writing this book, it wasn't so much that I was looking for an angle – the angle found me. Back in 2017, I was travelling around Africa making a television series called The History of Africa for BBC World News, and I spoke to dozens and dozens of historians, archaeologists and anthropologists right across the continent. However, without exception, every single one of those academics was so generous with their time that I had to tear myself away from them on every occasion. I thought to myself, “these people…

Here's a book that turns the history of music on its head, beginning in the present day before burrowing back through the layers of time to our forefathers, Australopithecus, somewhere between two and four million years ago. As an archaeologist, musicologist and historian, Graeme Lawson is here not interested in the traditional musicological stomping ground of stylistic eras and notable composers, but in the material traces of the musical past that have survived into our present day. And in this brilliant new book he reveals to us a dazzling showcase of instruments, both everyday and extraordinary, that have been found in locations as diverse as Baltic Sea shipwrecks and Egyptian tombs. In short, vivid chapters, we encounter a Baroque fiddle in near-perfect, 17th-century condition; a cache of flutes carved from…

Your Invention of… series looks at how history has made nations what they are today. Why did you choose to focus on China in these latest episodes? After 30 years of US domination, the last 15 years have seen the so-called multipolar world emerge. But within that multipolarity you have two great powers, with China now America's main rival. There should be a third great power, Europe, but it's not politically coherent enough to act in the way that both the US and China do. China now plays a critical role in the global economy and global politics in a way it never has before, and understanding how it got here, and what its motivations are, requires looking at history. How easy was it to record the series on location…

Zeinab Badawi “When you are taught Africa's history in a certain way, through the eyes of the conqueror, you get a very different history than from listening to the accounts of those on the receiving end.” Zeinab discusses her new book on African history – told from the perspective of African people on page 66 Richard Bradley “When we started out we were pretty catholic in our tastes – we did Vikings singing a Simon and Garfunkel song, even though I'm not sure many of our young audience would have had a clue who Simon and Garfunkel were!” Richard looks back at 15 years of the Horrible Histories TV show on page 11 Madeleine Pelling “I tell an unexpected history of Georgian Britain through the graffiti its inhabitants left behind,…

“From Beatles lyrics to Hindu scripture, translation is a true library of the world” I MET UP WITH A CHINESE FRIEND THE OTHER day at the British Library. What better place to reflect on human history as told through its literature? From Michelangelo and Leonardo, to the Ma'il Qur'an and the Codex Sinaiticus; from Jane Austen and George Orwell to Andrea Levy; from Beatles lyrics to Chinese oracle bones from more than 3,000 years ago, it is a true library of the world. My friend has just finished the first complete verse translation into Chinese of Virgil's Aeneid. In China, there's been a huge surge in translations over the past 30 years. Among them, for example, are the Harry Potter novels (with footnotes – and quite understandably so: how many…

Our relationship with graffiti is nothing if not complicated. On the one hand, it is a criminal offence, one that can result in prison time. On the other, works by street artists like Banksy fetch huge sums of money at the world's most exclusive auction houses. But it hasn't always been this way. For much of human history, leaving one's mark was a common, accepted occurrence. From the boasts of Roman gladiators to the prayer of medieval priests, graffiti was part of the everyday world. So how did we come to view this unruly and hard-to-define media with such mistrust and ambiguity? The answer lies in the 18th century. This was the age of revolutions in which graffiti underwent its own radical transformation to become something feared, reviled and legislated…

Fevered existence Joad R Wren (pictured) discusses All the Colours You Cannot Name, his tale of love and loss in the plague-afflicted London of 1666 This is your first novel. Were there parallels with writing historical non-fiction, or did the process surprise you? The writing process could not have been more different from the long library-bound slogs. I had recently had Covid and was commuting to Paris to teach at the Sorbonne. The novel was written in a few weeks, mostly on trains or in cheap restaurants. I was living a fevered, dissociated existence. What inspired you to set the novel in London of 1666? It's a period I know well, and I was looking for a way of thinking about Covid, about cognitive impairment and emotional dysregulation. A love…

On Saturday 29 August 1835, John Berkshire, a “respectable tradesman”, squeezed into a small loft, removed a loose tile and peered into the room of his lodger, one William Bonell. Berkshire was shocked at what he saw and, hurriedly squirming from the loft, rushed down to tell his wife. On hearing the news, Mrs Berkshire raced to the offending room to verify the shocking report. Strategically avoiding the cramped loft, Jane Berkshire instead squinted through the keyhole. When later pressed at court, if this was really “a fit thing for a modest woman” to be doing, she responded that her only intention was to see whether there was anything untoward occurring inside. Well, for early 19th-century society, what was happening inside this small room in London was enough to lead…

Across 1 African kingdom conquered by warriorqueen Njinga in the 17th century (7) 5 Term, meaning ‘son of a king’, used to describe a member of one of the patrilineal clans of western, central and northern India that first emerged in the sixth and seventh centuries AD (6) 10 Type of route, such as the Chisholm one from Texas to Kansas used by 19th-century cattle drovers (5) 11 Waterway that became a reality after Ferdinand de Lesseps was granted the ‘First Concession’ in November 1854 (4,5) 12 ‘Mother’ Ann __, Lancashire woman who introduced the Shaker sect to America in the 1770s (3) 13 A people of southern India and Sri Lanka, whose separatists formed the ‘Liberation Tigers’ in the 1970s (5) 14 Its use as an anaesthetic was first publicly demonstrated by a US dentist…

IN PROFILE Alfred Russel Wallace was a British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist and biologist. Besides independently conceiving the idea of evolution through natural selection at around the same time as Charles Darwin, he explored the Amazon river basin and the Malay Archipelago, collecting thousands of specimens which he wrote about in bestselling books such as The Malay Archipelago (1869). Often dubbed ‘the father of biogeography’, he died in Dorset, aged 90. “His books are characterised by derring-do and adrenaline, reflecting the fact he was someone who wanted adventure from life” When did you first hear about Wallace? I found a well-worn copy of his book The Malay Archipelago in a second-hand bookshop while travelling around south-east Asia in 1990. I read it from cover to cover in a couple of…