This article will feature in Issue 35: Fractured Nations (March 2020) Zadie Smith has said that the writer’s job is not ‘to tell us how somebody felt about something, it’s to tell us how the world works.’ Her 2000 novel White Teeth takes three cultures and three families and shows us how they experience the […]
The date April 24th, 2015, marked the centenary of the beginning of the horrific Armenian Genocide. Both the event and the commemoration of it accompanies a highly controversial debate over the nature of genocide and the acceptance of it as such.
“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.” ― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own Food is one among life’s endless delights. Throughout history, everything to do with food; its capture, cultivation, preparation and consumption; has molded human culture.Civilizations were inadvertently shaped by food as the early agrarian […]
Ancient Egypt was described by the ancient historian Herodotus as a land where men behaved in ways “opposite to other men in almost all matters” and one in which women “frequent the market and carry on trade, while the men remain at home and weave.” In antiquity, few women were granted close to what could […]
From Sir Lancelot du Lac of the Arthurian legend, to Jaime Lannister of Game of Thrones, history and popular culture alike are awash with knights. But is the truth of medieval chivalry hidden behind the romantic notions of knighthood we see on our screens and read in our books? If we look closer, perhaps we […]
Consider a map of the University of Manchester campus: it includes the main campus on Oxford Road, the collection of buildings and residences that make up North Campus and often halls of residence in Rusholme and Fallowfield. There are, however, large portions of the city missing, which can be explained by the navigational purposes of […]
After three previously unsuccessful attempts, the Argentine military overthrew the internally divided Peron government as part of the US-backed Operation Condor, and established a military junta in March 1976. Thus began the National Reorganization Process– the official term for the genocide of left wing political and ideological dissidents of the junta. General Iberico Saint Jean, […]
The Prayer Book rebellion, also referred to as the Western Rising, took place between 6th June and 17th August 1549, in Devon and Cornwall. This was a response to widespread opposition to the authorisation of the Book of Common Prayer in January of the same year. Both historically and contemporarily, Manchester has been considered by […]
The vampire – traditionally figured as an elusive aristocrat defiling victims to satiate his bloodthirst – has permeated Gothic literature since the early nineteenth century. Irish writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu is considered the first to lesbianise the subgenre with his 1872 novella, Carmilla. Le Fanu’s narrative is wrought with Catholic fears of homosexual monstrosity […]
“Reality is as thin as paper, and betrays with all its cracks its imitative character. A hundred times I had to try and test its taut skin with my hands, and had found it hopelessly botched.” These are the words of Jewish Galician writer Bruno Schulz, a globally relevant artist and painter, particularly recognised among […]
We usually think of protest as a collective act. Conventional wisdom tells us that to be a change maker you have to have other people standing behind you. The Napoleons, Mandelas and Lincolns of this world are considered exceptional individuals. However, in the last year, the use of twitter as a medium to express dissatisfaction […]
In today’s world culinary television shows, it seems unlikely that you would ever need a historical perspective. And yet, with remarkable accuracy Heston Blumenthal has managed to combine the art of cooking with historical fact in his show, Heston’s Feasts. The first season is a 5 part series that sees Heston explore and recreate some […]
We have retold the stories of the Second World War without pause since it drew to a close in 1945. Films are an increasingly important way in which we remember the Second World War. But yet, these films, while engrossing in character and wildly popular, do not always reflect how the Second World War actually […]
For centuries, women in western Europe suffering from a long list of, sometimes vague, symptoms – including anxiety, loss of sexual desire, or too much sexual desire, insomnia and being ‘difficult’- could find themselves being labelled with the common medical diagnosis of ‘female hysteria’. We have retold the stories of the Second World War without […]
