Tag: pkar

History cookbook

HISTORY COOKBOOK Creme à la Carême This French dessert is named after Marie-Antoine Carême, the famous early 19th-century chef who devised sumptuous banquets for the prince regent, later George IV. This recipe serves 10 to 12 people. Difficulty: 5/10 Time: 5 hours 15 mins INGREDIENTS 18 sponge fingers 100ml kirsch 135g orange jelly, made up […]

History on the airwaves

HISTORY ON THE AIRWAVES “We’ve been sending vinegar flies into orbit since 1947. I wish they went up in little space suits” DR ERICA MCALISTER (pictured), fly expert and senior curator at the Natural History Museum, tells us about her returning series Metamorphosis: How Insects Transformed Our World What’s the premise of the series? There’s […]

Diary

Diary VISIT / WATCH / LISTEN By Jonathan Wright and Rhiannon Davies VISIT Here be Vikings This spring, the Jorvik Viking Festival returns to York after an extended pandemic-related hiatus, and it promises to be bigger than ever. Traditional highlights – such as the Viking camp in Parliament Street and the march to Coppergate, during […]

Also on the bookshelf

Also on the bookshelf WORDS BY RHIANNON DAVIES & MATT ELTON FICTION Lion by Conn Iggulden Michael Joseph, 400 pages, £20 Conn Iggulden is no stranger to the ancient world, having written best-sellers set in Rome and Sparta. In Lion he revisits Greece, this time following the fortunes of Pericles, famous statesman of Athens. The […]

All at sea

MARITIME All at sea The Ship Asunder: A Maritime History of Britain in Eleven Vessels by Tom Nancollas Particular Books, 336 pages, £20 In the office of Lloyd’s of London, the pioneers of marine insurance, hangs the Lutine bell, recovered from the wreck of the ship Lutine in 1858. From Georgian ship deck to sea […]

First letters

LANGUAGE First letters Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present by Johanna Drucker University of Chicago Press, 384 pages, £32 At the heart of one of the world’s great storehouses of knowledge, the rooms built by Pope Sixtus V in the Vatican Library, are a series of pillars which literally […]

A congregation of voices

CHRISTIANITY A congregation of voices SARAH FOOT enjoys a new history of the Church of England, a book that finds space for the reflections of ordinary parishioners as well charting the deeds of the great and the good A People’s Church: A History of the Church of England by Jeremy Morris Profile Books, 480 pages, […]

Grave insights

ARCHAEOLOGY Grave insights BRENNA HASSETT recommends an account of life – and individual deaths – in Britain during the first millennium AD Buried: An Alternative History of the First Millennium in Britain by Alice Roberts Simon & Schuster, 352 pages, £20 Professor Alice Roberts opens her warm and illustrative history of Britain’s first millennium AD […]

Generating fear

SCIENCE Generating fear STEPHEN WALKER gives a nervous welcome to a history of nuclear power, which focuses on the accidents and the disasters that have plagued the sector Atoms and Ashes: From Bikini Atoll to Fukushima by Serhii Plokhy Allen Lane, 368 pages, £25 Unless most life as we know it has been wiped off […]