WELCOME

JUNE 2025

ANNIVERSARIES

D ANNY BIRD highlights events that took place in June in history

“Which historical figures will capture the imagination of a class on a rainy Thursday afternoon?”

OPINION

”A reader wrote in and said ‘That’s my mum!’”

25TH ANNIVERSARY

"Few works of 20th-century art have such a distinguished list of past owners"

FRAN MONKS Michael Wood is professor of public

"Samba schools used the carnival to foreground overlooked histories"

HIDDEN HISTORIES

LETTERS

LETTER OF THE MONTH

Q&A

A selection of historical conundrums answered by experts

BOOKS

CULTURAL “A single page can encompass Edvard Munch’s

“Africans have been starved of historical figures from their own lands that they can look up to”

PAULA AKPAN speaks to Danny Bird about powerful African woman leaders and the complexities of interrogating historical narratives, colonial biases and these women’s own flaws

Who says what and why they say it

DAVID RUNCIMAN is impressed by an exploration of how arguments over free speech are often rooted in a desire to close down dialogue

She’s the boss

Emily Maguire discusses Rapture, her novel about the legend of a female pope

A doctrine of self-control

FERN RIDDELL gives a cautious welcome to an exploration of American attitudes down the years towards both sex work and female sex workers

Diplomatic mission

RICHARD TOYE salutes an exploration of the relationship between the ‘Big Three’ Allied leaders

Katja Hoyer recalls how Iron Kingdom showed her a new way to write history

Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia,

The feel of truth

JOSEPH E USCINSKI enjoys an account of a fake report that supposedly exposed a huge conspiracy to wage war in support of the American economy

Dark matter

No Ordinary Deaths: A People’s History of Mortality

Mystical figures

Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age: A Forgotten

ENCOUNTERS

DIARY By Jonathan Wright and

EXHIBITIONS

Austen and Turner: A Country House Encounter Harewood

Investigating Agatha

Novelist Agatha Christie in her thirties. Sir David

Presidential campaign

Students stage a mass protest on the campus

A tragedy remembered

On 11 May 1985, when Bradford City’s supporters

Literary pursuits

Emőke Zsigmond plays Jane Austen in a new

RADIO HIGHLIGHTS

The political battle In July 1945, before the

Heritage mysteries

Pete, head gardener at Beatrix Potter’s Hill Top,

GAMES / Battling through turmoil

JAMES OSBORNE dives into a turbulent and transformative period of Japanese history on a mission involving a black samurai and a shady spy-warrior

Victorian jelly

RECIPE

Buenos Aires in five places

The city on the River Plate estuary is a colourful cultural melting pot, blending influences from successive waves of immigration. JASON WILSON picks five key historical sites to visit

PRIZE CROSSWORD

Across 1 Hippolytus, say, who headed a group

NEXT MONTH

July issue on sale 12 June 2025

Harry Price

1881–1948

Rome’s worst nightmare

When the Spartacus revolt erupted in 73 BC, it exposed a terrifying truth: that the cocksure Roman Republic was nowhere near as invincible as it liked to believe. Guy de la Bédoyère takes up the story

“These women transformed his understanding of the world”

Malcolm X became one of the most influential leaders in the US civil rights movement – thanks largely, explains Ashley D Farmer , to the women who shaped his life and ideas

Spiked drinks, counterfeit coins and the lodgers from hell

Drugging, fraud, even murder – women couldn’t really commit such heinous crimes, could they? Rosalind Crone explores five audacious female-led felonies from the 18th and 19th centuries

Painting on the precipice

Hans Holbein’s masterwork The Ambassadors is an exquisite portrait of two 16th-century diplomats. But it is also crammed with symbols and hidden messages. Tracy Borman deciphers the clues that betray the turbulence of a fateful year

25 things we’ve learned over the past 25 years

25 historical breakthroughs

Flower power

Few 17th-century women could travel the world. But the world could visit them in their gardens. Susannah Lyon-Whaley reveals how exotic plants – from Chinese rhubarb to South American passionfruit – opened new horizons in fashion, food and science