Fiona Veitch Smith travels to Weimar Berlin in 1930, using her antique Baedeker guidebook, and finds that the nearly 100-year-old book can still help her find the places she’s researching in the 2020s. In previous articles for Historia I outlined how I use vintage fashion and vintage guide books as research for my neo-Golden Age […]
The Jacobites and the Grand Tour by Jérémy Filet
In the first monograph to fully examine the intersecting networks of Jacobites and travellers to the continent, Filet considers how small states used official diplomacy and deployed soft power — embodied by educational academies — to achieve foreign policy goals. This work uses little-known archival materials to explain how and why certain small states secretly […]
Lady Dorothy Mills, explorer and writer
She was a pioneering explorer, a travel writer writer and novelist, an earl’s daughter who reinvented herself, a woman with a drive to “be something”. So why haven’t more of us heard of Lady Dorothy Mills? Her biographer, Jane Dismore, aims to change that. When Lady Dorothy ‘Dolly’ Mills was a young girl, a female […]
No Country For a Woman by Jane Dismore
Lady Dorothy ‘Dolly’ Mills was a trailblazer, whose larger-than-life personality led her to extraordinary adventures. Born in 1889 into the Walpole family, who were eminent in political and literary spheres, Dolly defied the constraints of her upper-class upbringing by marrying a poor army captain, prompting her disinheritance. From becoming the first English woman in Timbuktu […]
Review: Silk Roads exhibition
Lesley Downer reviews the Silk Roads exhibition at the British Museum, open until February, 2025. There’s something irresistibly romantic about the Silk Roads. The very name conjures up images of caravans of camels, piled high with baggage, wending their way across desert and steppes. It makes you want to pack your bags and set off […]
On the Narrow Road to the Deep North by Lesley Chan Downer
After eight years working in Japan, immersing herself in its language and literature, Lesley Chan Downer set off in the footsteps of Matsuo Basho, Japan s most cherished poet, to explore the country’s remote northern provinces. Basho’s pilgrimage to find the landscapes that had inspired the great medieval poets gave birth to Japan’s most famous […]
A Cheesemonger’s Tour de France by Ned Palmer
Charles de Gaulle famously said it was impossible to govern a country with 246 different cheeses. And perhaps he was right. Every French cheese carries an essence of the place where it’s made — its history, identity and landscape. Sometimes that’s a physical thing, as the hard texture of Comté echoes its rugged Alpine home. […]
Roman Andalusia
Alistair Tosh has a lifelong interest in Roman history and a love of Andalusia. When he began writing historical fiction it was natural to combine the two in his Edge of Empire series. Here he looks at the history of Roman Andalusia and at some of the places he features in his books. Warrior, the […]