Why is Netflix pretending that Cleopatra was black?
‘I remember my grandmother saying to me: I don’t care what they tell you in school, Cleopatra was black.’ So…
Was Leonardo da Vinci’s mother a slave?
There is great excitement in Italy, which has spilled over into the British press: Carlo Vecce, a professor from Naples,…
Captain Cook’s Aboriginal spears belong in Cambridge, not Australia
On the eve of the First World War, Trinity College, Cambridge deposited four spears collected by Captain Cook during his…
Why has president Xi got my book about the Mediterranean?
A few days ago, an email arrived from someone I know in China: my book The Great Sea had been…
Oh, brother
Rebellious ‘spares’ are a feature of history
Why the Rosetta Stone shouldn’t be returned to Egypt
The Rosetta Stone is said to be the most visited object in the British Museum. By and large the most…
Feeding the world
The Shetland Islands and the Faroes may seem to be somewhere out there in distant waters, marginal and in the…
Who’s out
The negative discrimination of Oxbridge admissions
The crop of gold
Publishers love books with ambitious subtitles such as ‘How Bubblegum Made the Modern World’, and this one’s, about American wheat…
Matter of time
Are children’s history books racist?
‘The Rothschilds of the East’
David Abulafia admires the shrewdness, generosity and panache of the Sassoons over many generations
Why does Priyamvada Gopal find ‘eloquence’ troubling?
Why should anyone feel insulted when they are described as ‘eloquent’? Priyamvada Gopal, professor of post-colonial studies at Cambridge University, felt…
Rhodes, Columbus and the next heritage battle
On 12 October this year, Columbus Day, a statue of the Italian in Belgrave Square was vandalised by activists from…
Secret weapon
What’s behind Cambridge’s anonymous reporting system?
University challenge
Conservatives are now the radicals on campus
Frankincense and myrrh
‘And when they were come into the house, they saw the young child with Mary his mother, and fell down,…
No, racism isn’t a ‘creation of white people’
I remember that, as a small child, I was told not to talk when my father took me inside the…
Empire states of mind
It is hard to find benign examples of imperialism
