The power of wax seals has never waned
In our electronic age it hardly comes as a surprise that Pat MacFadden’s Cabinet Office intends to do away with…
Is a keffiyeh really an appropriate outfit for a Cambridge University ceremony?
Cambridge University’s decision to honour the rap artist Stormzy with an honorary doctorate seemed odd. New universities, rather than our…
The strange attempt to find Muslim Vikings
A charity called the Brilliant Club offers support to disadvantaged pupils in non-selective state schools to enable them to aim…
Round the world in a vast, unlovely barge
How does the metamorphosis of lumbering, engineless vessel – from freight container to troop-carrier to prison, hostel and rusting hulk – reflect today’s economic climate?
The great explorers of the past dismissed as mercenary opportunists
Simon Park follows the current trend of accusing Columbus, Magellan, Da Gama and other famous navigators of seeking personal enrichment above all else
Cambridge’s Palestine vandals must be expelled
Frustrated by a High Court injunction that prohibits protestors from occupying University buildings in Cambridge so as to block a…
Is the tide turning on restitution?
When passions are aroused, all of us are liable to overstate our case. Dan Hicks, a curator at Oxford’s extraordinary…
The British Museum doesn’t need a slavery gallery
The British Museum is beginning to think about the possibility of embarking on a massive programme of refurbishment, repairs and…
Why is Labour ignoring Jewish academics over the Free Speech Act?
It is difficult to complain about the sentiments expressed by Bridget Phillipson, the Secretary of State for Education, in her…
Why are the sailors who first braved the Atlantic so often ignored?
Long before Columbus crossed the ocean in 1492, the Phoenicians had discovered the Azores, and by the year 1000 Norse men and women were eking out an existence in Greenland
Labour’s outrageous attack on academic free speech
In an extraordinary outburst, a government source has described the new Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, introduced by the…
Should this Anglo-Saxon drama have a diverse cast?
A new eight-part TV series co-produced by the BBC about England in 1066, entitled King and Conqueror, has diverse actors playing…
The British Museum shouldn’t make foreigners pay
The interim director of the British Museum, Mark Jones, has broached the idea that our national museums should charge foreign…
Why won’t this museum let women see its Igbo mask?
The Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford has won a reputation for its energetic programme of ‘decolonisation’. Its director, Laura van Broekhoven,…
Are all great civilisations doomed?
If plague, war or natural disasters don’t destroy our own, then ‘a cascading systems failure’ seems likely, on past evidence, says Paul Cooper
Trinity College Cambridge has rushed to judgement on Captain Cook
Cambridge has made a mistake in returning to the tribe that made them some spears collected by Captain Cook’s men…
A wealth of knowledge salvaged from shipwrecks
Goods found on board can illuminate trade routes and global connections, often going back thousands of years, in ways no other archaeological sites can
The danger of returning the Ghanaian ‘Crown Jewels’
I put the case in last week’s Spectator that museums in this country have been gripped by a sort of…
Does it matter if Hannibal is played by a black man?
It is becoming a familiar conundrum: whether to employ actors who match the ethnicity of the person they are portraying.…
Was the Black Death racist?
Even the Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century, we are now being told, practised racial discrimination as it raged through…
Tracey Emin and the problem with museum trustees
The Royal Academy has nominated Tracey Emin to be a trustee of the British Museum. There is quite a fanfare…
Why are Cambridge University’s librarians judging ‘problematic’ books?
Librarians across Cambridge University are on the look out. Their target, among the ten million-odd volumes in the main library…
Sic transit gloria mundi
Katherine Pangonis also traces the histories of Tyre, Antioch, Syracuse and Ravenna, once proud centres of government, trade and culture
The big beast in peril
As the world’s thermometer, the ocean keeps everything in balance, but carbon emissions and our use of it as a dumping ground is threatening its life, says Helen Czerski
