the Reformation
Imperialism still overshadows our intellectual history
Some of Peter Watson’s musings on the empire might have been sacrificed for discussions of music and architecture – and the place of George Orwell in the British imagination
The pointlessness of the German Peasants’ War – except in Marxist ideology
The short-lived 16th-century revolt resolved absolutely nothing, but it loomed large in Engels’s thought and in the official DDR interpretation of history
We’ll never know what treasures the Tudor Reformation robbed us of
Amy Jeffs likens the shattered world of medieval Christianity to the dispersed relics of the many saints whose memory Henry VIII hoped to obliterate
All work and no play is dulling our senses
Ancient Greek philosophers reckoned that life was all about free time, but 16th-century puritanism dealt a blow to the old festive culture from which we’ve never fully recovered
The firebrand preacher who put Martin Luther in the shade
Andrew Drummond traces the short, turbulent career of Thomas Müntzer, the rabble-rousing revolutionary behind the peasants’ uprising in 1520s Germany
The truth one year, heresy the next: The Book of Days, by Francesca Kay, reviewed
A richly imagined novel unfolds in an Oxfordshire village as the accession of the child king Edward VI brings another round of ‘newfanglery’ in religion
Ordinary women make just as thrilling history as great men
Philippa Gregory investigates the lives of English women over 900 years – in sickness, health, business, war, prayer and prostitution
When atheists stole the moral high ground
In 1585, Jacques du Perron presented to the court of the French king Henry III, as a kind of after-dinner…
The brutish origins of British liberalism
If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the one to heaven may be surfaced with bad ones.…
Wool, wheat and wet weather
Englishness is big business in the nation of shopkeepers, and not just in politics and tourism. In literature, the gypsy…
Full of sound and fury
John Knox, Cranmer complained, was ‘one of those unquiet spirits, which can like nothing but that is after their own…
Of cabbages and kings
Nigel Jones reviews the first five titles to appear in a new series on British monarchs
The Putney boy done good
The travel writer Colin Thubron once told me that to understand a country and its people he first asks, ‘What…
Eat, drink and be merry…
... for tomorrow traditional seasonal rituals may just be ghostly memories of a vanished world, says Melanie McDonagh
