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From Joan of Arc to Brigitte Bardot: meet the trailblazing women who shaped French history
Katherine Pangonis speaks to Charlotte Vosper about the extraordinary women often excluded from France’s national story – and what their lives reveal about the country
Charlotte Vosper: In your book, you tell the history of France through the lives of 21 women. How did you choose who to include? Katherine Pangonis: I had this idea to revisit French history by looking at women who were not necessarily the most famous, but through whose lives you could explore pivotal moments of change in French history. I wanted to pick women whose experiences encapsulated or shed new light on the events that we think we know well, but usually through male-centric lenses. I wanted to draw attention to the fact that the women who played roles in great moments of change in French history weren’t just footnotes or exceptions, but that their lives actively shaped politics, culture, religion and the French identity over centuries. By following their lives, I hope I can help the reader to see the history of France a bit differently. That was my key mission when selecting the women for the book. You suggest women have been systematically excluded from the national narrative of French history. Can you expand on this? I think it’s a combination of both deliberate and inadvertent exclusion from the French national narrative. Really, this links to a bigger question about the representation of women in history. In the written historical record, the lack of female representation comes down to the basic fact that throughout most of history the majority of the population were illiterate, and secondly, that the small number of the population that were educated in reading and writing, tended to be male. Today, while women aren’t totally erased from the French historical narrative, there is a lack of information about them. This book started with my long walks in the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris, where there are 20 statues of the queens and illustrious women of France. We see these women’s faces and their historical costumes, but none of the statues have any information about women’s lives attached to them. This is often the case in museums, too. One of my favourite museums is the Musée Carnavalet, which looks at the history of Paris from its early origins to the modern day. It’s an excellent museum, but the roles of women just aren’t highlighted enough. For example, they have a room about the Enlightenment which includes a desk belonging to Voltaire, a key thinker from the period. Near the desk, a portrait of Émilie Du Châtelet hangs on the wall. Du Châtelet was a fantastic mathematician in her own right and she contributed hugely to Voltaire’s work. But there is no information about her in the museum. In many cases, I think this lack of recognition comes from big institutions’ reluctance to go below the surface of existing, widely available information. This is in the process of changing though. There’s a movement among historians to redress the balance, and I would like my book to contribute to that. Read more | Medieval influencers: 4 women who brought change to the Middle Ages I would like to zone in on some of the women in your book. Let’s start with Christine de Pizan. What can you tell us about her? De Pizan was one of the first women known to make a living from her writing. She was born in Venice around 1364 and moved to France when her highly educated father began work at Charles V’s court as an astrologer. Her father made a deliberate effort to educate her, beyond what was expected at the time. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-1425784369webready-56362d6-e1774964759865.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A medieval manuscript scene shows crowned and veiled women studying around a table with books and instruments, while two others build a white‑brick wall with mortar." title="A miniature from Le Livre de la Cité des Dames. In this landmark 15th-century book, Christine de Pizan imagines an allegorical city of refuge whose walls are built from the achievements of women, ranging from warriors to artists to saints (Image by Getty Images)" /> At 15, Christine married a 26-year-old man in what seems to have been a real love match. They lived together and had children, but when he died in 1389, de Pizan was left a young widow. Suddenly, she found herself as the only breadwinner, with small children and an aging mother to look after. In response, she dedicated herself to building a career as a writer, creating these beautiful and painstakingly handwritten manuscripts. At the French court she was well positioned to find wealthy patrons to sell her works to, and so she managed to support her children with her writing, earning enough to educate them and broker them good marriages. De Pizan left behind an impressive surviving body of work, which is why researching her was so rewarding for me. She wrote about other women and elevated the female artists who illustrated her works, and in this sense, we can call her a protofeminist. She really was a fantastic figure. So you think that we can read modern identities, such as de Pizan being a ‘protofeminist’, back into the past? We can definitely see the beginnings of modern ideas in earlier thinking. While there are dramatic differences between the moral frameworks of different time periods, there’s a huge amount of shared experience throughout history. Philosophical, emotional and spiritual threads link us with the people that came before us. Projecting modern values onto the past is risky, but there are connections through time. Some of what Christine de Pizan wrote about women is problematic by modern feminist standards, like the way she writes about sex workers. While she was progressive for her day, she is not progressive enough to be called a ‘good feminist’ in the 21st century. Nevertheless, I think her work did lay the foundations of modern feminism to an extent. She built a career for herself and wrote tracts defending women against critical stereotypes. In this, we can see her as a key figure in the very early phases of the feminist movement, even if her personal values didn’t align with modern feminist ones. Read more | Joséphine de Beauharnais: how Napoleon's muse became empress of France De Pizan’s historical significance may be evident but is the influence on French history of the other women in your book as tangible? Soft power plays a critical role throughout the book. I was motivated by two considerations when selecting people to write about. I wanted to choose women who were active political agents, and in that category I would include de Pizan. I’d also include Louise Michel, an incredible activist during the Paris Commune who is often hailed as the mother of anarchy, and of course Olympe de Gouges, a woman who was pro-revolution but ended up on the block of the guillotine herself. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-89856741webready-c1fb3a9-e1774965105277.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white studio photograph of a person with short, wavy hair, dressed in a dark garment with a patterned collar and a tied scarf at the neck, posed against a plain backdrop." title="The feminist, anarchist and social activist Louise Michel (1830–1905) (Image by Getty Images)" /> And yet, beyond these women, I’ve also included those whose historical influence was less tangible, and whose lives shed light on the less well-known parts of French history. In that category, I would include St Balthild of Chelles, a Frankish queen during the Dark Ages who set the stage for later powerful queens like Eleanor of Aquitaine. I’d also put Béatrice de Planisolles – a 13th-century noblewoman who was subjected to the Cathar inquisition – in that category. She wasn’t particularly powerful or wealthy, but she left behind these amazing inquisition records about how she lived her life and what she thought and felt. Then, of course, there was the Empress Joséphine Bonaparte, the wife of Napoleon. Most of her power came through her influence as a cultural icon and her profound influence on her husband. Other women who follow in this vein include the painter Berthe Morisot, who changed how women’s lives were viewed in the arts, and the singer Édith Piaf, who wrote about love, tragedy and emotional trauma. There is a soft and artistic power that reverberates from these women throughout history, and I’ve tried to capture that in the book as well. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/hip2684290webready-bace3df-e1774965238511.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A formal painted portrait of a woman wearing a jeweled tiara and an embroidered white gown, her right hand placed on a crown set on a richly decorated cushion, with a throne and drapery behind her." title="Joséphine (1763–1814), the empress of France and wife of Napoleon Bonaparte (Image by Topfoto)" /> As well as giving due attention to female power and influence, it’s also important to recognise women with more complex legacies. How did you assess their historical impact and balance that with the more troubling aspects of their life stories? That’s a really interesting question. While, as I’ve said already, I think projecting moral values onto figures of the past is tricky and not particularly rewarding, in the case of Coco Chanel, I think we can view her with our modern value systems in mind. Chanel died in the mid-20th century, and while there have been seismic societal changes between then and now, she is not so far removed from us that we should play down her complex legacy by saying she lived in a different time. Chanel has been accused of being a Nazi sympathiser. She stayed in Paris during the German occupation, lived in a lavish suite at the Ritz with her lover (who was a Nazi intelligence officer), and she offered up her services as a spy on behalf of the Nazi regime. Yes, she liberated women from corsets, modernised how women dress, and made women’s fashion more comfortable and more practical. But while this is iconic, we cannot divorce her influence on fashion from the fact that her personal conduct was terrible. Some people would argue that the punishment of French women who had Nazi lovers during the occupation was too harsh: their heads were shaved, they were whipped, and they were shamed terribly. In some cases, it was arguably justified; in others – such as poor women who had no one else to protect them – perhaps not. But I’d argue that Chanel did have choices. Women like the dancer Josephine Baker, who was in Paris during the war and offers a direct parallel, offered her services to the French Resistance at great personal risk and to help Jewish families. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-1277359054-2webready-35a4f72-e1774968738135.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white photo of a person in a dark jacket, light blouse, and hat with a brooch, leaning on a table with their head resting on one arm." title="The designer Coco Chanel, pictured in 1954, may have modernised fashion, but she had ties to the Nazis (Image by Getty Images)" /> Certainly, the modern fashion house is far removed from the original woman, and you can love Chanel designs, but her Nazi sympathies are a part of Coco’s story which it’s important to fully acknowledge. It was also difficult to navigate my inclusion of the actor, singer and model Brigitte Bardot in the book. She was an enduring icon of French culture but also had problematic views. I had to tread a fine line when evaluating how to acknowledge her iconic status, while highlighting that she is not necessarily a woman we should always look up to. In her early career, Bardot’s acting roles turned her into a liberating symbol of female sexuality, and she promoted the free expression of women’s sexual desires. But when she stepped away from the spotlight at the age of 39 and dedicated herself to animal rights activism, she used that cause to criticise religious groups and endorse racial prejudice. On this basis, she was fined for hate speech. I included her as the last woman in my book because I think her public image reflects the divisions in modern France. It is a deeply divided country. Vast waves of the population now vote for far-right parties and French citizens violently disagree with each other. This is part of a wider political trend in Europe, and I think Bardot represents this divisive landscape. Do you think the extraordinary women you write about can help us understand the lives of ordinary women in the past? I think we can certainly use the women in the book to understand the struggles of ordinary women. A good example is George Sand, the 19th-century writer who begged her mother for them to leave their aristocratic family and run away together. Sand wanted to start a hat shop, but her mother refused, telling Sand it would be impossible. She opened Sand’s eyes to just how dangerous and precarious life was for women without money and protection. In this moment, we see the shattering of Sand’s illusion that anything is possible, a testament to just how difficult life was for ordinary women in France over the centuries. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/rv52986-1webready-380713e-e1774968581596.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A shoulder‑length painted portrait of a person with dark, wavy hair decorated with red and white flowers, shown against a muted brown background." title="An 1837 oil portrait of the prolific and popular 19th-century French novelist George Sand (Image by Topfoto)" /> Another example is Béatrice de Planisolles. She was married off at a young age to an older man, raped by another, and suffered an attempted rape later in her life. De Planisolles experienced horrible things at so many points in her life, just like the other women in my book. Joan of Arc and Olympe de Gouges were executed. Brigitte Bardot suffered depression and was suicidal at points in her life. Djamila Boupacha, an Algerian militant, was also subjected to rape and sexual abuse. These are extreme cases, but they draw attention to the deep-seated misogyny and racial prejudice that has existed in French society for a very long time. Read more | “In times of political volatility, it’s more vital than ever that we tell women’s stories” | 3 historians on the state of women's history These were women who have arguably led successful and, in some cases, charmed lives, but they have also all been subjected to powerlessness and oppression. This book offers windows into lots of different women’s lives, and together they speak to the ubiquitous issues that women have faced. Whether or not these women’s lives give us insight into the experiences of ordinary women, they show us the pervasive challenges and threats that women have faced throughout history. These issues exist today, and while many women today live freer lives than they would have done a hundred years ago, there is still work to be done. Do any continuities or common experiences unite the women in your book? On the one hand, we might ask what relationship could there really be between St Balthild, the Anglo-Saxon slave girl who was trafficked from Britain to the Kingdom of the Franks and married the king, and Brigitte Bardot, the modern screen icon? But, on the other hand, I see huge points of connection. Most of the women in this book are self-made and they did not follow the paths laid out for them at birth. No one would have expected St Balthild to become Queen of the Franks, or Christine de Pizan to generate her own income from writing, or Joan of Arc to lead a French army. The wealthy, aristocratic George Sand became a trouser-wearing cigar-smoking linchpin of the Parisian literary scene, and in this, she controlled her own destiny. Simone Veil survived the Holocaust to become a leading woman in French and European politics. The women in my book were trailblazers, and that’s the thread linking them. Whether they were heroines or villains or something in between, they all managed to take control of their lives and position themselves as active agents in their own eras. I think that’s amazing. What do you hope will come out of your female-focused history of France? I hope this book will introduce readers to some women who perhaps they hadn’t heard of before. People will probably have heard of Joan of Arc, Eleanor of Aquitaine and Brigitte Bardot. But I’m not sure how many of my readers will know about Louise Michel, Christine de Pizan, Djamila Boupacha or St Balthilde of Chelles. And so I hope that my book can plant seeds in readers’ minds. It is by no means a comprehensive work on the roles of women in French history, nor is it an in-depth academic work, but I hope that the book will whet readers’ appetites, pique their interests, and show them that there is much more to French history than they might have originally thought. Katherine Pangonis is a writer whose work focuses on the Middle East and Mediterranean regions, and the interactions between east and west. Her books include Queens of Jerusalem: The Women Who Dared to Rule (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2021) This article was first published in the March 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
He was one of England's greatest astronomers – so why has no one heard of him?
Children's author and screenwriter Frank Cottrell-Boyce chooses Jeremiah Horrocks (1618–41) as his history hero
When did you first hear about Jeremiah Horrocks? As a child, I saw him and his telescope on the stained-glass windows at St Michael’s Church in Much Hoole, Lancashire. The windows, depicting his groundbreaking observation of the transit of Venus in 1639, were such an unexpected sight that I never forgot them. What kind of man was he? Born into an ordinary Lancastrian family, he lived in a small, tight-knit Puritan community. He was later a sizar at Cambridge University, where he had to chop wood and wait on the other students. He was fascinated by astronomy and the question of time from an early age – partly because his father was a watchmaker – and it became his life’s passion. Read more | Star witness: how the Royal Observatory transformed our understanding of astronomy and time What made him a hero? Unlike most great astronomers in history – such as Kepler, who worked for the Holy Roman Emperor – Horrocks was of modest means. He bought a telescope for two shillings and sixpence, and just had a strong sense in his bones of the rhythm of the moon and the tides – perhaps because he’d lived alongside the Mersey, with its huge tidal range. He paid great attention to the natural world around him, partly due to a profound religious conviction: he thought there was purpose in looking at the stars. When Newton spoke about standing on the shoulders of giants, one of the people he was talking about was Horrocks. What was Horrocks’ finest hour? He didn’t have a finest hour – but he did have one of the finest 15 minutes in history. On the day of the transit of Venus, there was thick cloud. It was also a Sunday so, being a Puritan, he was busy. But he set up his telescope all the same. A little after three o’clock, the sky cleared for a short while and he watched Venus move across the face of the sun. He wrote an important treatise on the transit, Venus in sole visa. The airport in Liverpool, which is just around the corner from where he lived, is named after John Lennon – but it should be named after Jeremiah Horrocks. As a nation, we sadly undervalue scientists. Is there anything that you don’t particularly admire about Horrocks? No. I think he’s wonderful – and the fact that he achieved so much despite dying so young only increases my admiration. Read more | Why the scientific revolution was far from just a European phenomenon Can you see any parallels between his life and your own? Only in the sense that we both had great passions in our lives – his was for astronomy and mine is for words. What would you ask him if you could meet him? I’d ask what inspired him to keep checking in on that telescope – even though he was busy, the Lancastrian sky was often cloudy, and there must have been people telling him: “You’ve got no chance, mate!” This article was first published in the February 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
"Let the sky rain potatoes!": the hidden meanings behind Shakespeare's food obsession
Shakespeare and his peers served up hearty helpings of diverse dishes and ingredients – many of them spiced with forgotten meanings. Sam Bilton reveals how food allusions illustrate key themes of everyday life
“There shall be no more cakes and ale” Puritan hypocrisy Shakespeare’s works are peppered with countless food references: pies, cakes, capons and a great deal of sherry, for starters. Some are set-dressing details, but many were allusions that would have been obvious to theatregoers of the day – references to dietary theory, political ideas and cultural mores. Food was important to all – something to which everyone could relate, irrespective of social standing or level of literacy. Take the moment in Act 2, Scene 3 of Twelfth Night when the fun-loving Sir Toby Belch asks Olivia’s Puritan steward, Malvolio: “Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-171071495webready-c1637ad-e1774448528234.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A figure dressed in theatrical, jester‑style attire poses against a sepia, textured backdrop. They wear a tall hat with a pom‑pom, a large ruffled collar, and a voluminous dark cloak. One hand holds a slender staff; the other holds a small object topped with a circular shape" title="Malvolio in Twelfth Night. This pompous Puritan is ridiculed for censuring ‘ales’ (festive social gatherings) (Image by Getty Images)" /> In Shakespeare’s day, the word ‘ale’ referred not only to a drink but also to social gatherings celebrating everything from religious holidays (for example, Whitsun-ales) to weddings – hence the word ‘bridal’, from ‘bride-ale’. In this period, cake was more akin to brioche, and contained expensive ingredients such as sugar, spices and exotic dried fruit – definitely a luxury. Cakes and ale parties were occasional treats for most – and strictly off-limits to Puritans. So, in this scene, Sir Toby is ridiculing Malvolio’s prim and proper attitude, calling him a party pooper. In his play Bartholomew Fair (1614), Shakespeare’s contemporary Ben Jonson also highlights the hypocrisy of religious zealots. The Puritan pastor Zeal-of-the-land Busy is a former baker of cakes “served to bridals, may-poles, morrices, and such profane feasts and meetings”. Busy is highly critical of displays of gluttony, such as eating a hog roast at the fair, particularly by women. Yet moments before he launches into a diatribe against eating pork in public, he is caught “fast by the teeth in the cold turkey-pie in the cupboard, with a great white loaf on his left hand, and a glass of malmsey on his right”. White bread and malmsey wine were trappings of a well-to-do lifestyle. As for Malvolio, he throws his righteousness out of the window the minute he comes to believe – falsely – that Olivia is in love with him. He is described as plumping his proverbial feathers like a “turkeycock” and imagining himself wearing velvet, a fabric reserved for nobility. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/hip1620562webready-fd246db-e1774448660973.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A formal banquet scene shows richly dressed figures seated and standing around a long table covered with a white cloth. Servants and guests interact as food and drink are served, with architectural details and a distant landscape visible in the background." title="A 19th-century illustration of a banquet scene in The Taming of the Shrew. In Shakespeare’s play, Petruchio hopes to soften his wife Katherina’s ‘choler’ (ill-temper) by restricting her diet (Image by Topfoto)" /> “Did he marry me to famish me?” Balancing humours In the early modern period, the prevailing Galenic theory of health held that a person’s physical well-being was governed by four ‘humours’ in the body: blood, black bile, yellow bile and phlegm. For good health, these humours had to be in balance; if one dominated, it could result in physical or mental issues. For example, people with an excess of black bile were inclined to despondency and introspection, like Jacques in As You Like It. In The Taming of the Shrew, newly wed Katherina is “Renown’d in Padua for her scolding tongue”. According to the humoural theory of the period, this behaviour would indicate an excess of yellow bile, making her ‘choleric’, or quick to anger. Read more | Shakespeare didn't love his wife and he abandoned his family to move to London: are these 13 rumours about the playwright true? Such a humoural imbalance might be treated through diet. Foods were also classified by their nature: hot, dry, cold or wet. Essentially, you were what you ate. ‘Choleric’ people such as Katherina were considered to be hot and dry, so foods of a similar nature could potentially exacerbate the imbalance and make these folk even more irritable. At the beginning of Act IV, Katherina’s husband, Petruchio, orders the removal from the table of some overdone mutton because it “engenders choler, planteth anger”. Later in the same act, Petruchio’s manservant, Grumio, offers Katherina a series of tempting foods culminating in a dish of beef and mustard – but retracts all of these in turn, deeming them too choleric. Exasperated and hungry, Katherina chases Grumio from the room, shouting: “Go, get thee gone, thou false deluding slave, That feed’st me with the very name of meat.” By denying Katherina sustenance, Petruchio is hoping to correct her behaviour and rebalance her humours. Clearly, he was not familiar with the concept of being ‘hangry’. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-1314701597webready-3135879-e1774448807729.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A humorous scene shows three soldiers in colourful Renaissance clothing. One sits on the ground grimacing beside a broken sword, with a leek stuck in his mouth while the central standing figure lifts a stick as if scolding or threatening him. A third soldier in blue stands behind them holding a spear and smiling. Rows of tents and distant mountains form the backdrop." title="A Georgian print shows proud Welshman Fluellen forcing the sneery English ensign Pistol (left) to eat a raw leek – with potentially unpleasant health consequences – in Henry V (Image by Getty Images)" /> "If you can mock a leek, you can eat a leek" National pride In Shakespeare’s day, experts on dietary theory regarded leeks as food for rustics who had strong constitutions – they were unsuitable for more gentrified folk. At best, when cooked in a pottage, leeks had a diuretic effect – good for drawing out phlegm. At worst, eating them could cause toothache, flatulence, headaches and nightmares. So leeks, particularly in their raw state, were best avoided – which may explain why they feature in so few recipes found in early modern cookbooks. For the Welsh, however, the leek was an emblem of national pride. Leeks were worn in Monmouth caps on Saint David’s Day (1 March) to commemorate the Welsh victory over the Saxons in the sixth century. So in Henry V, the Welsh captain Fluellen is incensed when the ensign Pistol mocks that emblem, and jibes that the Welshman eats his leek with bread and salt, thereby demoting it to a basic food stuff. In Act 5, Scene 1, Fluellen exacts his revenge by beating Pistol with a raw leek then forcing him to eat it, exclaiming: “Because, look you, you do not love it, nor your affections and your appetites and your digestions does not agree with it, I would desire you to eat it.” Though this scene undoubtedly has comic undertones, Shakespeare’s audiences would also have been well aware of the potential consequences for Pistol’s health. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/ali051530webready-d1a9ba0-e1774448887475.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A medieval illustration depicts two adults working at a wooden table, kneading a large round mass of dough. A child in blue stands in a doorway to the left, observing, while a white dog drinks from the ground beneath the table. The building has patterned walls and two leafy trees stand nearby." title="Women make butter in an illustration from a medieval health treatise. People from the Low Countries were known for their love of butter, which was thought to ward off colic (Image by Topfoto)" /> “I will rather trust a Fleming with my butter” Attitudes to immigrants Food was often used to highlight cultural stereotypes. For example, the Flemish and Dutch were renowned for their love of butter. In Ben Jonson’s play Volpone (c1605/06), Mosca says: “You shall ha’ some will swallow / A melting heir, as glibly, as your Dutch / Will pills of butter, and ne’re purge for’t.” So: dishonest people swindle the naive without remorse – or as blithely as the Dutch eat butter. Read more | The simple secret that kept the ordinary Tudor diet surprisingly healthy Foreign characters were often played for laughs, but some food references reveal deeper prejudices. In Sir Thomas More, attributed to Anthony Munday and Henry Chettle with revisions by others including Shakespeare, xenophobic English merchants decry immigrants for introducing parsnips into the country. The fear is that these “strange roots” grown in manure cause disease: “Trash, trash; they breed sore eyes, and tis enough to infect the city with the palsey.” That play also expresses a fear that immigrants in London were eating more than their fair share of food, and stealing local people’s livelihoods: “For so it is that aliens and strangers eat the bread from the fatherless children, and take the living from all the artificers and the intercourse from all the merchants, whereby poverty is so much increased.” Such lines reflect attitudes of the day to foreigners in England. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/BAL179666webready-51e7483-e1774448962531.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A side‑by‑side botanical illustration shows a yam (Dioscorea alata) on the left and a sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) on the right. Each plant is drawn with its brown tuber, green leaves, and distinctive flowers—small buds on the yam and pinkish‑purple funnel‑shaped blooms on the sweet potato." title="Sweet potato, shown here, was an exotic luxury in Shakespeare’s time, and believed to have aphrodisiac properties (Image by Bridgeman)" /> “Let the sky rain potatoes!” Exotic aphrodisiacs Modern theatregoers watching The Merry Wives of Windsor may be puzzled by Sir John Falstaff’s line invoking a bombardment of potatoes – particularly in what is supposed to be a scene of seduction or, as Falstaff puts it, “a tempest of provocation”. But in Shakespeare’s day, certain foods were believed to have aphrodisiac properties – among them the exotic potato, along with the eryngo (sea holly) roots also mentioned in this speech. The tubers invoked in Shakespeare’s play were most likely what was then known as the Spanish variety, or sweet potatoes. At that time, these were viewed as novelty foods and, therefore, luxuries, not staples. They were often preserved with sugar – also considered a lust-inducing ingredient – and aromatics such as rosewater. One 16th-century cook, Thomas Dawson, included potatoes in his recipe for ‘A Tart That Is a Courage to a Man or Woman’, along with quinces (another aphrodisiac), sugar, spices and cock-sparrow brains. The recipe ends with the instruction: “So let it boyle till it be something bigge”. This probably isn’t a euphemism for anything saucy – but, given the lusty nature of the ingredients, who’s to say what Dawson is really driving at? Incidentally, during this period parsnips were also believed to promote lustful urges – another strike against the foreigners who introduced that root vegetable, and who were often viewed as being lascivious. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/MARXC2webready-a3df156-e1774449069447.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A medieval-style scene depicts two figures seated together in a large wooden tub beneath a blue canopy. The person on the right is reaching across to touch the breast of the other person in the tub. Two attendants in long gowns stand beside them, one carrying a jug and the other a plate. A brick wall and window frame the setting" title="A colourised 16th-century woodcut shows a couple being served food and drink while frolicking in a bath. Stewed prunes were associated with brothels, possibly based on a belief that they helped protect against sexually transmitted diseases (Image by Alamy)" /> “I cannot abide the smell of hot meat since” Witty innuendo While some foods were believed to boost sexual appetites and performance, others were considered to provide protection from associated risks. For example, unlikely as it seems today, in earlier times stewed prunes were associated with prostitutes and brothels. In the satirical poem The Knave of Harts (1612) by Samuel Rowlands, a “whoring knave” is served with ‘‘Burnt wine, stew’d Prunes, a Puncke [prostitute] to solace him”. Why the reference to prunes here? One theory is that they were believed to protect against sexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis. Links between prostitution and food don’t end with prunes. Take the following line spoken by Abraham Slender in The Merry Wives of Windsor: “I bruised my shin th’ other day with playing at sword and dagger with a master of fence – three veneys for a dish of stewed prunes – and, by my troth, I cannot abide the smell of hot meat since.” Read more | What did the Tudors think was ‘good’ sex? These tips and tricks were key to relationships in the 16th century The first part implies that he is talking about a fencing match – but what on earth do prunes and hot meat have to do with swordplay? The reference to stewed prunes suggests that Slender is in fact talking about an episode in a brothel. In addition, prostitutes were often compared to joints of meat such as mutton – hence the end of his comment. When the Hostess in Henry IV, Part 2 quips: “What’s a joint of mutton or two in a whole Lent?” she’s saying that a dalliance with a prostitute (or two) can do no harm, even for the virtuous. So the “hot meat” to which Slender refers is a sex worker, and veney is an archaic English word meaning a bout or thrust. Essentially, he is talking about a poor sexual encounter with a prostitute. So why not have Slender say more plainly: “I had a bad experience with a prostitute, and now I’m sworn off all women”? Given the sexual innuendo prevalent in early modern plays, it seems unlikely that the use of food references to allude to sex was an attempt to avoid censorship – in fact, blasphemy and political comments were more likely to upset the authorities. In any case, the meaning of these phrases was entirely transparent at the time. Rather, food references – in the comedies, particularly – injected added wit into dialogue. Sam Bilton is a food historian, author and podcaster. Her latest book is Much Ado About Cooking: Delicious Shakespearean Feasts for Every Occasion (OH, 2025) This article was first published in the March 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
Churchill vs Stalin: did this one speech cause the Cold War?
It’s 80 years since the war victor delivered his ‘Iron Curtain’ speech, sounding the alarm for a perilous new age. The speech, given as tensions with Stalin soared, is among the most famous in modern history. Yet, asks Richard Toye, has it been misunderstood?
“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” It was the soundbite of the century – or at least of the Cold War. Uttered by a former prime minister in a speech on 5 March 1946 at a small college in Missouri, its intended audience was far larger than the scholars and public figures assembled in the institution’s gymnasium. The fact that the ex-PM in question was war victor Winston Churchill – and that sitting on stage alongside him was US president Harry S Truman – helped turn this lecture into a world-shaking historical event. Churchill made a lot of speeches in his long political career. Few of them, however, had the same resounding impact as this warning about the Soviet threat. A set of unique circumstances lent his oration its unusual power – and endowed it with the capacity to shape the language of east-west conflict for decades to come. The Iron Curtain speech was delivered at a time of acute – and escalating – tensions between the Soviet Union and western powers. It’s often been described as the moment that the starting gun was fired on the Cold War. It’s indisputably among the most momentous pieces of oratory of the postwar period. And yet, for all that, it’s clouded in misunderstanding. Much of that misapprehension stems from the fact that the speech had surprisingly long roots – roots stretching all the way back to Anglo-Russian imperial conflicts in the late 19th century. When Churchill rose to his feet and addressed his audience at Fulton, he was 71 years old. He was, as he declared himself, a child of the Victorian age. The legacy of the so-called ‘Great Game’ – strategic competition between Britain and Russia in central Asia – was a factor throughout his political career. Even as a schoolboy, he wrote an essay in which he fantasised about a British invasion of Russia and gloated of “the superiority of John Bull over the Russian bear”. Strangling Bolshevism Yet Churchill’s attitude to Russia – and even to the USSR – was by no means one of unremitting hostility. And that was reflected in the Fulton speech, too. He was no admirer of tsarist autocracy, and even less so of Soviet communism. But during the First World War he eulogised Britain’s Russian allies, and was distressed when they dropped out of the conflict. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-2148990418webready-1ebb782-e1773837016975.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A Soviet propaganda poster shows a person in a white shirt lifting a red flag with gold tassels against a red background." title="A poster declares the Soviet Union’s commitment to “stable peace”. By the time Churchill delivered his Iron Curtain speech, such peace appeared fragile" /> Churchill became the strongest advocate of intervention in the civil war that followed the October Revolution of 1917, and always regretted the failure “to strangle Bolshevism at its birth”. Following Hitler’s rise to power, he began to see the Soviet Union as a counterweight to Nazi Germany, and even as a possible ally. In a March 1939 interview, he asserted that the USSR had “hitherto shown no trace of the aggressive intentions” behind the recent actions of the Germans, the Italians and the Japanese. Even after the Soviets and Germans signed a non-aggression pact that August, he appeared to foresee that the USSR’s national interests would eventually force Stalin into an anti-German posture. His prediction came true with Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. The functional but troubled Anglo-Soviet alliance that followed provides the crucial backdrop to the breakdown in relations that the Iron Curtain speech signalled. Churchill continued to view diplomacy through a traditional ‘Great Power’ lens. That is to say, history was made via hard bargains between the paramount countries, recognising each other’s spheres of influence and legitimate interests, and often involving the ruthless sacrifice of weaker peoples and nations. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-544235714webready-7c819e2-e1773923825162.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A dynamic propaganda illustration depicts revolutionaries on a massive red machine marked “1917,” waving red flags and carrying rifles as they charge ahead, while caricatured figures of the old regime are shown below, fleeing or being crushed." title="Withdrawing money: A Soviet propaganda poster shows bankers fleeing the Russian Revolution. Churchill viewed the events of 1917 as an enormous tragedy. (Image by GettyImages)" /> Churchill’s wartime meetings and correspondence with Stalin were based on this principle – and also on the belief that personal relations were crucial, and that his own individual charm could make a difference. He said in 1942 that he “liked Mr Stalin, liked his jokes and his humour, but could have gotten on with him a lot better if he could have talked with him directly instead of through an interpreter”. Combining tough talk with schmoozing and flattery, he believed that mutual recognition of British and Soviet spheres of interest represented the path to a safer future. The Iron Curtain speech of 1946 reflected the continuation of this approach, rather than a radical shift in outlook. Read more | Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt: the big three's war of words Falling for Stalin’s charms Churchill, however, oscillated between optimistic and pessimistic interpretations of Soviet behaviour. After the February 1945 Yalta conference – at which the British, Soviet and American leaders discussed the postwar reorganisation of Europe – the prime minister told colleagues: “Poor Neville Chamberlain believed he could trust Hitler. He was wrong. But I don’t think I’m wrong about Stalin.” Yet as the Red Army’s advance progressed, he became increasingly concerned about the prospect of Soviet dominance of Europe. On 12 May, just a few days after VE Day, Churchill wrote to President Truman of the need to reach a concordat with the USSR before the British and American armies ‘melted’ with the onset of peace. “An iron curtain is drawn down between their front,” he added. This was his first rehearsal of a phrase he would later make famous. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-690507912webready-b966227-e1773837530368.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A military parade of uniformed soldiers marches in front of the heavily damaged Reichstag building, its dome partially destroyed." title="On the march Red Army troops in Berlin, 1945. Western leaders were, by now, growing ever more alarmed at the prospect of a Soviet-dominated Europe" /> Six days later, Churchill lectured the Soviet ambassador, accusing his Kremlin masters of “dropping an iron screen across Europe from Lubeck to Trieste, behind which we had no knowledge of what was happening”. Churchill’s diatribe did not have the desired effect. The ambassador told Moscow that “we need to bear in mind that we are dealing with an adventurer, for whom war is his natural element”. Indeed, Churchill was already pondering ‘Operation Unthinkable’, a military plan – quickly dropped – for a potential military conflict with the Soviets. But at the Potsdam conference of July 1945 (at which the ‘Big Three’ Allied leaders convened once more), he was, in the words of foreign secretary Anthony Eden, “under Stalin’s spell again”. Eden reported that Churchill "kept repeating: 'I like that man.'" <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-1354478830webready-bf749bf.jpg" width="4630" height="3087" alt="A black‑and‑white photograph shows several men in formal suits and military uniforms gathered closely, speaking with one another indoors." title="Admiring gaze Stalin (second left), Truman (centre) and Churchill (right) at the Potsdam conference of summer 1945. It was here that the British PM repeatedly remarked of his Soviet counterpart: “I like that man”" /> Churchill’s participation in the negotiations was about to be brought to a sudden and unexpected end – for, before the Potsdam conference was concluded, news came through that he had been voted out of power in that summer’s general election. Churchill’s shock electoral defeat was a bitter political and personal blow, but it didn’t have a material impact on Anglo-Soviet relations: the new Labour government carried on foreign policy on familiar lines. When parliament reassembled, Churchill made his first public reference to “the iron curtain which at the moment divides Europe in twain”. His words were reported in the press but did not make headlines, and attracted little comment. It should be noted that Churchill was now speaking in a new context, following the successful test of the atomic bomb and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Though he could not say so openly, he hoped that the American monopoly of the new weapon would be the lever that would keep Soviet ambitions in check. He was thoroughly conscious of Britain’s weakening global strength, and believed that a strong relationship with the US was key to escaping its precarious position. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-513666223webready-da7f49c-e1773838887773.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white photograph shows a towering mushroom cloud billowing upward over a city landscape" title="Bargaining power An atomic bomb explodes over Hiroshima, 6 August 1945. This display of might persuaded Churchill that the west could negotiate with Stalin from a position of strength. (Image by GettyImages)" /> For this reason, the message he received from Truman that autumn was a godsend. The president passed on an invitation from the head of Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri to deliver the annual John Findley Green Foundation Lecture on problems of international concern. “This is a wonderful school in my home state,” scribbled Truman on the letter. “Hope you can do it. I’ll introduce you.” Churchill, still harbouring designs of returning to Downing Street, now had an opportunity to relaunch himself on the world stage, as well as to take a holiday in the sun. During his lengthy absence from home at the start of 1946, Churchill sojourned in Florida and Cuba before travelling to Washington, DC. Truman accompanied him to Fulton by train. As the train approached Missouri, a crisis was unfolding in Persia (now Iran) on the back of a speech by Stalin that seemed to anticipate conflict with the capitalist powers. The Soviets had failed to withdraw all of their troops from the north of Persia by the deadline that had previously been agreed. But though the president was increasingly incensed by their stonewalling stance, he was not yet ready to lay his fears and frustrations in front of his war-weary populace. With no official responsibilities, however, Churchill could speak frankly in a way that those in government could not. Read more | How the Cold War made the modern world The bombshell moment On 5 March, Churchill delivered his remarks before 2,700 people, all of them white. As one black American newspaper noted, the college was “located in a state where Jim Crow is a legal instrument of government and Negro boys and girls are barred from its portals by law”. The mainstream media made little of this shocking fact, but the message contained within the speech itself was regarded as a bombshell. Churchill’s oration was 46 minutes and 5,000 words long. The ‘iron curtain’ phrase came at the two-thirds mark. It was part of a broader warning about the Soviet Union’s “expansive and proselytising tendencies”, which Churchill backed up with claims about Moscow’s search for “totalitarian control” in the countries of central and eastern Europe. Yet despite the muscular rhetoric, scholars now tend to emphasise that the Iron Curtain speech was not a Cold War clarion call intended to stoke tensions. This is another way in which the speech has been misunderstood. Churchill undoubtedly wanted to reset relations through plain speaking, but he also wanted to show the Soviets that he understood their perspective. Hence he stressed his “strong admiration and regard for the valiant Russian people and for my wartime comrade, Marshal Stalin”. He stated that he understood “the Russian need to be secure on her western frontiers by the removal of all possibility of German aggression”. It was necessary, he said, to reach “a good understanding on all points with Russia” under the auspices of the recently formed United Nations. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-514080312webready-522ed2b.jpg" width="3115" height="2076" alt="An older man in a light smock and hat sits in a wicker chair, painting a coastal landscape at an easel." title="Brush with destiny Churchill at his easel in Miami Beach, February 1946. President Truman’s invitation to speak at Fulton gave the former PM an opportunity to soak up some sun and" /> Over the following days and weeks, few observers paid much heed to the more emollient sentiments in Churchill’s speech. The nuances of the former PM’s words were easily lost in the media tumult. In fact, the forcefulness of his overall message risked exacerbating the problem he was trying to solve. “Churchill’s speech is sure some blockbuster, as one American paper describes it,” noted one ordinary observer, a female librarian back in Britain. “I read it first in full, and later heard extracts; and I must say that his delivery was so calm and flowing that the parts which had horrified me in print seemed perfectly innocuous as he spoke them.” Churchill offered not only a diagnosis of the perils of deteriorating east-west relations but also a remedy – and in the US it was the latter that proved especially divisive. He urged that a robust response to the Soviets should be built upon “a special relationship between the British Commonwealth and empire and the United States”. This seemingly innocuous phrase was widely (and correctly) perceived as a concealed call for a military alliance between the UK and the US. Read more | Winston Churchill created the special relationship. Could Donald Trump kill it? This lit a fire, because former isolationists still distrusted the British empire, and progressive idealists believed that a bilateral pact would be a threat to the integrity of the UN. Leo Amery, Churchill’s former secretary of state for India and Burma, thought it was an error to link the admonitions about the Soviets and the alliance concept together in one speech. “The Americans are intensely suspicious of any attempt to inveigle them into being mere instruments of British policy in the Old World,” observe Amery. Meanwhile, Adam Clayton Powell, the first African American to represent New York in Congress, claimed that Churchill wanted “an English-speaking dictatorship” and “a form of super-nationalism based on race” that would plunge the world once again into war. Truman had known of the speech’s contents in advance but, when the political kitchen heated up, denied having done so. Britain’s Labour prime minister, Clement Attlee, took refuge in the claim that his government was “not called upon to express any opinion of a speech delivered in another country by a private individual”. However, in private he was less dismissive: “It will certainly have done good if it encourages the Americans to think and to recognise the need for the United States and the British Commonwealth to work together,” he said. The destiny of the world It is not clear if Churchill really expected the speech to cause the Soviets to change their attitude – but if so, he failed. “Hitler began his work of unleashing war by proclaiming a race theory, declaring that only German-speaking people constituted a superior nation,” Stalin told the Soviet state-mouthpiece, Pravda. “Mr Churchill sets out to unleash war with a race theory, asserting that only English-speaking nations are superior nations, who are called upon to decide the destinies of the entire world.” With fear spreading, Moscow housewives started panic-buying. The Soviet authorities then tried to calm the public, spreading the message that “Stalin’s interview did not mean that war was in sight”. The Fulton speech may have elicited a frosty reception in Moscow but, within a year, despite the initial misgivings, its once-controversial message had found widespread acceptance in the west. As tensions between America and the Soviet Union ratcheted up further, the 1947 Truman Doctrine committed the US to “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures”. The doctrine is now seen by some historians as marking the true start of the Cold War. To this day, politicians on both sides of the Atlantic pay lip service to the Anglo-American ‘special relationship’. And Churchill was not quite done with the Soviet Union. Prime minister again from 1951–55, he ploughed his remaining strength into a vain quest for a rapprochement with the post-Stalin Kremlin. This was not because he had changed his mind; rather, his quest for détente was of a piece with his longstanding approach to great power relations and his belief in the importance of negotiating from a position of strength. He was convinced that the greatest chance of peace lay in convincing the Soviet government that they were confronted by superior force that would be used ruthlessly against them unless they mended their ways. “Then the communists will make a bargain,” he judged. East-west relations would have continued declining with or without the Iron Curtain speech. Yet although Churchill did not start the Cold War at Fulton, he selected its defining image – and with carefully crafted vocabulary he created an indelible mental picture that influenced all subsequent debate. Metal coinage Was Churchill really the first to use the phrase 'Iron Curtain'? “Iron curtain: a state of rigid censorship and secrecy (coined by Winston Churchill in 1946 to describe the line of demarcation between western Europe and the Soviet zone of influence)”. This was the definition included in the American College Dictionary. But the editors remained uncertain – had Churchill genuinely originated the term? In 1951, a member of that publication’s team wrote to him to find out. There were good reasons for wondering. The metaphor is based not on conventional domestic drapes but on the fire safety curtains used in theatres. In a 1904 novel, Churchill’s friend HG Wells (pictured) described how, when a character is deprived of his freedom, “an iron curtain… dropped between him and the outer world”. The historian Patrick Wright credits the writer Vernon Lee (a pseudonym for Violet Paget) as being the first to deploy the term in an international relations context. She wrote of “war’s monstrous iron curtain” dividing the two sides after the outbreak of hostilities in 1914. After the October 1917 revolution, the phrase was used in a new sense. In her 1920 book Through Bolshevik Russia, Ethel Snowden described her arrival in Petrograd as part of a Labour delegation: “We were behind the ‘iron curtain’ at last!” It is more than possible that Churchill was acquainted with these examples. But, if so, the influence was unconscious. In response to the query about the origins of his words, he replied: “No. I didn’t hear of the phrase before – though everyone has heard of the ‘iron curtain’ which descends in a theatre.” The dictionary definition stood. The fact that Churchill saw ‘iron curtain’ as a standard expression may explain why he did not do more to attract attention to it. The official title of his speech was ‘The Sinews of Peace’. This, in turn, offers a clue as to why the famous phrase didn’t dominate newspaper headlines. The Daily Express, for example, ran with “CHURCHILL URGES EMPIRE ‘ALLIANCE’ WITH U.S”. The first BBC reporting, on the 11pm radio news, omitted the ‘iron curtain’ passage altogether. Churchill was a genius with words. But even he did not know which of his own would be best remembered. Was ChurcWas Churchill really the first to use the phrase ‘Iron Curtain’?hill really the first to use the ph Richard Toye is professor of modern history at the University of Exeter. He is co-host of the podcast Churchill: The Finest Half Hour This article was first published in the March 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
The relentless rise of the mafia: a grisly tale of extortion, execution and Don Corleone
The 20th century was a golden age for organised crime groups. Ryan Gingeras reveals how gangs from the Sicilian Mafia to Mexico’s cartels capitalised on political chaos, economic upheaval and mass migration to spread their tentacles around the world
In the early 1860s Sicily was incorporated into the Kingdom of Italy. Soon after, visitors to the island discovered what they believed was a criminal fraternity at work in Palermo and its environs. That fraternity – the ‘Mafia’ – possessed secret rites and bylaws that governed its members. Chief among their rules was the vow of silence, omertà, when it came to their interactions with the police. Many assumed this ‘honoured society’ was born out of the prisons of Palermo, a place where hardened criminals mixed with members of secret revolutionary organisations. Before 1900, Mafiosi distinguished themselves by a clear pattern of criminal behaviour. Brigand gangs who robbed travellers on the roads were bound to the Mafia. Large landowners and government officials abetted the murders, thefts and acts of extortion mafiosi committed. Yet there were aspects of what Mafia was that remained difficult to pin down. Mafiosi, Palermo’s mayor told one public enquiry, could be “anyone who has self-respect and has a certain exaggerated pride, and the inclination to not be overwhelmed but to overwhelm others, the will to appear courageous, to be ready to fight, and so on”. For people in the 19th century, what made Sicily’s Mafia significant was the threat it posed to the government in Rome. Mafiosi appeared to rule the island from the shadows. The violence associated with them was used to intimidate citizens and to demonstrate its power to the Italian capital. In the global context, the Sicilian Mafia seemed to be a part of a pattern. Other secret organisations were challenging states and empires in the hopes of winning self-rule or overthrowing governments. By the start of the 20th century, commentators outside of Italy began characterising nationalist guerrillas, anarchists and other revolutionaries as ‘mafias’ in their own right. The first generations Colloquially speaking, the word ‘mafia’ is often used as shorthand for groups involved in organised crime. But not every gang enjoyed the distinction of being called a mafia. Genuine mafias possess gravitas and do not come and go. They possess a culture, history or pedigree that adds to their status. Their mythos overshadows the exploits or dangers of the common criminal. The term ‘mafia’ is quite old. Use of the word dates back centuries in Italy, even though its meaning and significance has evolved. For Sicilians, ‘mafia’ historically meant a kind of boldness. A mafioso specifically denoted someone who was domineering or who bragged of their strength or prowess. Scholars tend to agree that the Sicilian Mafia is one of four historic mafias that endure to this day. The other three –the Camorra, which emerged in Naples, China’s Triads and the Yakuza in Japan – have similarly rich backstories. In each case, the development of these groups or subcultures speaks to their cultural roots. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-1082329096webready-e3f9054-e1773654775259.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Two men in traditional Japanese formal dress walk at the front of a group, followed by several men in dark suits. They appear to be outdoors during a formal event" title="Members of the Yakuza, Japan’s notorious organised crime syndicate, attend a funeral in Kobe, 1981. From the mid-19th century, the group were integral to the radicalisation of Japanese politics (Image by Getty Images)" /> The precise story of how the Yakuza came into existence is a detail lost to time. The term itself originates from the phonetics of the word ya-ku-za, meaning 8-9-3, the worst hand to hold in a Japanese game of cards. This name alone confirms that gamblers were the first to acquire a connection to Yakuza culture, which dates back as far as the seventh century. Intimidating opponents Unlike Sicily’s Mafia, Yakuza culture spanned much of Japan. From the Middle Ages forward, Japan’s elite relied upon clan members to manage or mitigate crime within their midst. Violence was a key to Yakuza culture, as were intricate tattoos and rituals. Later, after the Meiji Restoration (1868) and the establishment of a modern state, political operatives sought Yakuza support in the hope of intimidating opponents. Yakuza became integral to the radicalisation of Japanese politics, a process that eventually led the nation into the Second World War. Read more | The first mafia? How an early medieval kingdom perfected the art of deadly diplomacy Neither crime, nor politics, gave birth to China’s Triads. Their history dates to the country’s tradition of secret mystical societies. A feature of this was the way fraternal organisations promoted folk religion and mutual aid for China’s rural underclass. With Manchu conquest in the 17th century, these organisations morphed into secret societies associated with opposition to the government. The establishment of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912) led to the creation of a group calling itself the Three United Society, from which the term ‘triad’ was coined. The number of Triad-derived groups rose as Manchu rule grew increasingly more unpopular in the 19th century. To sustain themselves, many secret societies resorted to theft, extortion and the sex trade. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-1354467399webready-f00eeb0-e1773654880975.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Three individuals stand side by side before an ornate, possibly ceremonial backdrop. One wears a light suit, while the others wear traditional Chinese clothing. Each has a ribbon pinned to their chest." title="Shanghai gangsters in c1925. In the early 1900s, secret societies capitalised on a power vacuum to form de facto governments across much of China (Image by Getty Images)" /> Adding to the strength and mysticism of the Triads were rich customs and a hierarchical structure involving initiations. After the fall of the Qing in 1912, secret societies expanded their influence over much of China, in many cases forming de facto governments over the countryside. Europe’s fragmented political landscape did not produce such universalised criminal societies. To understand the growth of the Camorra, we need to begin with 18th-century freemasonry. This provided a critical model for the organisation of subversive groups. Political radicals embraced its cult of secrecy and hierarchy in building movements aimed at national liberation or revolution. In the port city of Naples, rather less idealistic figures also took inspiration as, within the main prison, inmates in the early 19th century began to mimic masonic traditions in crafting secret codes and rules. Outsiders called this budding culture the Camorra, a possible allusion to the chamarra, or jackets, they wore. Camorra culture gradually exited the prison, finding members among the impoverished of Naples. With the threat of nationalist revolution threatening the city’s establishment, political leaders in Naples relied on the Camorra as informants and enforcers. Similarly to the Mafia in Sicily, Camorristi monopolised and exploited the underworld of Naples as extortionists and smugglers. They formed alliances with business leaders, politicians and the police. They became part of the city’s elite. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-1450387208webready-88367a6-e1773654963308.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Four uniformed officers stand in a line in front of tall metal bars, behind which several people are confined, some gripping the bars and looking outward. The setting appears institutional, with tiled walls" title="Italian police guard men accused of being members of the Camorra, during a trial in Naples, 1985. This crime group was originally modelled on the secret codes and rules of 18th-century freemasonry (Image by Getty Images)" /> Coming to America Each of these cultures initially operated as provincial conspiracies. Yet in the late 19th century, an era of mass migration, this changed. Like the millions of other people leaving Asia and Europe, Triads, Camorristi, Yakuza and Mafiosi sailed abroad. Many settled in the United States where they fell into familiar patterns of behaviour. This was a phenomenon Americans recognised almost immediately. In the run-up to the new century, newspapers took a keen interest in what they believed were vast immigrant conspiracies. Urban areas appeared to develop new underworlds as the vice trade came under the control of Chinese fraternal lodges (often referred to as Tongs). Japanese gamblers formed violent gangs on the west coast. Italian extortionists, known as Black Hands, became the scourge of communities across the USA. Read more | How J Edgar Hoover secretly ruled America Tabloids feasted on these revelations and fanned anti-immigrant sentiment. An occasional offence could be forgiven but, as one Mississippi editor put it, “When foreign groups transport and carry on here their Tongs, mafias, vendettas, class enmities and hostilities, it is a disturbance of such alien… and bloody character that America is not obliged to endure it and should not.” Like activists in other parts of the western world, crusaders in US cities grew fearful of the effect gambling and prostitution had on society. Increased use of alcohol and narcotics similarly concerned advocates for women’s rights and child welfare. Dispensing these goods and services were ‘organised crimes’ in so far as each required an illicit chain of suppliers, dealers and consumers. With the west in the lead, lawmakers around the world agreed to take more stringent steps to combat vice at home. As the world’s biggest economy and a country left largely unscarred by both the First and Second World Wars, America assumed a leading role in this movement. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-515170982webready-e7ec811-e1773656015480.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white portrait shows a person wearing a light fedora, dark overcoat with a velvet collar, white shirt, and striped tie, facing slightly to the right against a plain background" title="Gangsters such as Al Capone cashed in on the prohibition of drugs and alcohol (Image by Getty Images)" /> Domestically, attempts to clamp down on the use of alcohol and narcotics catalysed huge changes within the American underworld. Early beneficiaries of the Prohibition era were individuals who shared connections to the Mafia and Camorra traditions. They created a system of ‘families’ that held sway over bootleg liquor and vice across swathes of the country. Newspapers and newsreels captured their ascendency, as did early talkies such as Scarface (1932). Al Capone embodied this moment in his dress, cant, swagger and flair for publicity. Newspapermen loved him. “His whole demeanour,” one journalist noted, “is that of an overgrown child.” Capone could easily persuade a know-nothing stranger that he was as “harmless as a big St Bernard dog”. If the modern mafioso has a father, it would be him. Dope goes global It was only in retrospect, however, that American authorities conceived of bootleggers as a part of a distinctly American mafia. This crucial turn occurred after the Second World War, when peace brought a dramatic surge in narcotics trafficking. Heroin streamed across both the Atlantic and Pacific into a newly prosperous USA, a trade led by both old and new syndicates. Triad-linked groups traded in heroin cultivated in Burma and processed in Hong Kong. Meanwhile, Corsican syndicates, as well as Sicilian mafiosi, exported even larger amounts of dope from Turkey and Lebanon. This latter ‘French Connection’ drew the attention of Washington’s top narcotics official, Harry Anslinger. In the 1950s, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) had long lived in the shadow of J Edgar Hoover’s FBI. This fact roiled Anslinger so much that he went on the offensive. Amid a climate of growing paranoia, Anslinger’s FBN seized the national spotlight with a series of fantastic revelations. Through televised senatorial hearings, government witnesses testified to a criminal conspiracy extending in and beyond the USA. At its heart were the rites and tradition of Sicily’s Mafia. American crime families, in coordination with syndicates abroad, dominated the global narcotics industry. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/0112042-2webready-35fd87a-e1773655091113.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="In a courtroom, two men talk beside a wooden barrier; one wears dark sunglasses. Behind them, several uniformed officers sit in rows, with more people visible in the background" title="Sicilian Mafia boss Luciano Leggio talks with his lawyer during a trial of mafiosi in 1969. “What made Sicily’s Mafia significant was the threat it posed to the government in Rome,” writes Ryan Gingeras (Image by Topfoto)" /> In 1963, Anslinger’s star witness, Joseph Valachi, added explosive touches to proceedings. Valachi, a one-time New York gangster, confirmed the existence of a singular criminal culture. Members, he claimed, called it ‘cosa nostra’, our thing. Valachi’s story reverberated worldwide. America, it seemed, had its own mafia, one that led the world in a host of nefarious dealings. Meanwhile, older mafias abroad were experiencing their own renaissance. The rise of fascism and the outbreak of war in 1939 inflicted devastating losses upon the gangsters of Naples and Sicily. Similarly, Triads and Yakuza gangs suffered at the hands of invading armies and collapsed governments. Yet with the restoration of peace, a new generation took advantage of the emerging postwar environment. Read more | The A-Z of British gangs and gangsters They formed partnerships with local politicians charged with organising reconstruction efforts. Yakuza and mafiosi found common cause with rightwing political parties that feared the growing popularity of leftist movements. Above all, Italian, Chinese and Japanese gangsters realised unprecedented opportunities to profit from the narcotics trade. This changed the character of these older criminal fraternities. Mafiosi of an earlier time, as one Sicilian don saw them, were “dignified people, gentlemanly and inherently good”. Narcotics trafficking, and the riches that came with it, often warped and diminished the character of those involved. Super Mario The idea of a life of crime impacting on gang members themselves was popularised in the work of the Italian-American novelist Mario Puzo. By his own account, Puzo had no particular affinity for crime stories but, when he was looking for a subject with wide appeal, he remembered Valachi’s testimony and began researching mob history. Puzo’s novel The Godfather (1969) sold millions of copies. A then ailing Paramount Studios bought the rights and head of production Bob Evans took a chance in hiring a young Francis Ford Coppola to direct the cinematic version. The film, released in 1972, took the Academy Award for Best Picture and racked up millions at the box office. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/3B5WNKGwebready-c054e86-e1773655386592.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Two individuals stand outdoors with a red building and a green‑white‑red flag or banner blurred in the background. The person on the left, with short hair and glasses, wears a dark jacket over a sweater and collared shirt and stands with arms crossed. The person on the right, also wearing glasses, has longer hair and a full beard and wears a brown jacket over a striped shirt while looking slightly upward." title="Mario Puzo (left) and Francis Ford Coppola on the set of The Godfather Part II in 1973. Puzo was inspired to write his iconic crime novel by Joseph Valachi’s testimony (Image by Alamy)" /> At no point do characters in The Godfather utter the word ‘mafia’. Viewers and critics, however, understood the film offered a close dissection of the phenomenon. The movie fulfilled the audience’s expectations. “Consciously or not,” as one French critic said, “people are inclined to believe that the true princes who govern us are hidden masters, all-powerful [but] anonymous.” The Godfather and its 1974 sequel changed how gangsters talked and how they went about their work. Even before 1972, mafiosi in Sicily began to refer to their secret society as ‘La Cosa Nostra’. After The Godfather, they also began calling their betters ‘padrinos’, a term used in the film. Around the world, criminal groups started referring to their leaders as godfathers (or some translation of the word) and began to mimic the organisational structure from the film. Life imitated art. Coppola’s opus arrived in cinemas at a time when the international drug trade was growing rapidly. Heroin consumption began to peak in the US and started to rise in western Europe. Cocaine, previously a boutique drug, began to appear in greater amounts in US cities. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-1423176387webready-9c7c07f-e1773655583523.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An outdoor wedding reception takes place under a green‑and‑white striped canopy. A long table is set with flowers and a tiered cake, where the bride, groom, and other guests sit. In the foreground, a man in a dark suit warmly greets a man in a military uniform holding his hat. Behind them, elegantly dressed guests—including a woman in a red polka‑dot dress and wide‑brimmed hat—watch the exchange with smiles. Trees and hanging decorations create a festive atmosphere" title="Vito’s son and successor, Michael (Al Pacino), is greeted by his brother Sonny, played by James Caan. Such was the impact of The Godfather that, in its wake, real-life gangsters mimicked the Corleones’ organisational structure, changing how they talked and operated (Image by Getty Images)" /> Newer criminal groups emerged too. Before the end of the 1970s, two cocaine trafficking coalitions took shape in the Colombian cities of Medellín and Cali. Parallel developments in Mexico also gave birth to a similar alliance of drug smugglers run from Guadalajara. Some in the press initially referred to these groups as mafias. Law enforcement officials instead took to calling them cartels due to their perceived similarity to the petroleum consortium, OPEC. It was the latter name that took hold. A key figure was Pablo Escobar of Medellín. Having dabbled in smuggling as a youth, his reputation for violence sealed his close ties to landowners and drug runners. He drew inspiration from The Godfather and mimicked the “slow manners and long silences” of Marlon Brando’s performance. Escobar, however, was far more brutal than the fictitious Vito Corleone. His cartel murdered thousands, including some 200 judges and 700 police officers. Escobar’s death at the hands of Colombian security forces in 1993 marked the end of the Medellín Cartel. The cocaine trade, however, lived on. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-108556393webready-0846542-e1773655693174.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A close‑up portrait of a person with curly dark hair, a mustache, and light skin, wearing a light shirt and beige jacket against a dark, blurred background" title="Pablo Escobar took inspiration from the fictitious Vito Corleone. Yet, writes Ryan Gingeras, “he was far more brutal” (Image by Getty Images)" /> Cases across the Pacific spoke to increased activity among the Yakuza and Triads. In the wake of The Godfather, exposés in western media took particular interest in how Japanese and Chinese gangsters compared to western crime syndicates. For many journalists, Asia’s ‘mafias’ appeared more malevolent and exotic. The secret rites of the Yakuza and Triads made their involvement in the drug trade seem more difficult to police. No enquiry into the world of the Japanese gangster failed to mention their intricate tattoos, the katana swords with which they often fought or the severing of their pinkies as acts of contrition. The press made much of the supposed Triad penalties of “death by 5,000 thunderbolts” and the “flowing of blood from the body’s five openings”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-90768133webready-e58bc1e-e1773655170247.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="“Seen from behind, a person displays an elaborate traditional Japanese tattoo covering their back and upper arms, featuring a warrior figure. They stand against a wooden panel, with decorative floral motifs framing the image" title="A heavily tattooed Japanese man in c1895. Body art and rituals have both been associated with Yakuza culture over its long history (Image by Getty Images)" /> Meanwhile, the sheer number of supposed mafias surged during the 1980s and 1990s. Increased cocaine production in Latin America touched off upheaval in Colombia and Mexico, leading to unprecedented waves of violence and, as governments pushed back, the fragmentation of existing cartels. As smuggling routes grew more complex, Jamaican and Nigerian groups grew in influence. Street gangs such as the Bloods and Crips metastasised across the USA, specialising in the retail trade in drugs. Unholy alliances The dissolution of the eastern bloc had even more dramatic consequences. The sudden liquidation of state-owned industries across the former Soviet Union forged a series of unholy alliances between presumptive oligarchs and gangs. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-627229258webready-33cb468-e1773655825345.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Two people in military uniform stand over a pile of leaves, burning a fire in the middle of the pile. Large clouds of smoke are billowing up from the fire" title="Soldiers burn coca leaves in 1989. A surge in heroin and cocaine consumption across the west fuelled the rise of South American cartels (Image by Getty Images)" /> Other syndicates comprising Chechens, Albanians, Kurds, Serbs and Turks came to cast a shadow over different parts of Europe. The emergence of these groups led political leaders across the world to see their collective security in a new light. As the new century dawned, the United Nations formally adopted a convention dedicated to combating transnational organised crime. To mark the occasion, signatories assembled for a ceremony in Corleone, the Italian birthplace of Puzo’s fictional Godfather. Throughout this period, ‘mafia’ became a byword for describing new groups emerging in the west. The ease with which commentators referred to Russian, Albanian, Nigerian or Turkish mafias obscured the fact that no single group anchored their creation. Popular culture helped cement the impression that mafias were a global phenomenon. Read more | The Victorians’ cocaine habit: why 19th-century Britain couldn't get enough of the 'miracle' drug During this process, the narrative around organised crime moved far beyond the four historic mafias. Indeed, you could plausibly argue that such terms as gangsters, organised crime and the mafia have become interchangeable. So does the term mafia still have a special meaning and power? Yes, in that it encompasses a world where gangsters don’t just operate in the criminal sphere, somehow separated from the rest of society, but influence politics, commerce, culture and even international affairs. Without mafias, history since the late 19th century would have been very different. Mafias may operate in the shadows, but shining light on them helps us to see the past more clearly. Ryan Gingeras is the author of Mafia: A Global History (Simon & Schuster, 2026) This article was first published in the March 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
"We shall never surrender": 14 quotes that have defined the past century
Words have the power to alter the course of history. They can harden the resolve of an entire nation or people, encapsulate the ideals of a movement, and evoke joy – or provoke anger – long after they have been said. Here, Dr Seán Lang explores 14 of the most influential quotes of the past 100 years
<img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/RooseveltGettyImages-464783507-622899f-e1773405930967.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Franklin D. Roosevelt sits at a desk in an official setting, with papers, a microphone, glasses, and an ashtray arranged in front of him, heavy curtains framing the background." title="President Franklin D Roosevelt prepares for his inaugural speech, 1933. The former New York governor had won the presidency based on his promised ‘New Deal’, which lasted until the Second World War (Image by Getty Images)" /> 1. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” Franklin D Roosevelt, 1933 The United States lay devastated by the Great Depression, an economic collapse without precedent that destroyed the country’s global image as a land of opportunity and reduced millions of Americans to poverty and destitution. The governor of New York, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had run for and won the presidency on the promise of a massive recovery programme, dubbed the ‘New Deal’, but he knew he could do nothing unless the American people first regained their self-belief. In his inaugural address on 4 March 1933, Roosevelt reassured them that they had nothing to fear, except fear itself – “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror, which paralyses needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” The New Deal lasted throughout the 1930s until World War II set the country back towards full employment. Through the programme of reforms, regulations and projects, Roosevelt understood the power of words. He explained policies simply and clearly to radio listeners in his ‘fireside chats’, reassuring Americans that they had what it would take to improve their own lives and that the government would help. Roosevelt was elected an unprecedented four times, but it was that first inaugural message that set the tone for his time in office and helped give back the US its self-belief. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/ChurchillGettyImages-2667802-081f3a8-e1773403673660.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A man in a suit and hat stands outside a brick building, holding a cane and raising his hand in a V‑for‑Victory gesture" title="Winston Churchill gives his famous ‘V for Victory’ hand signal outside 10 Downing Street. The prime minister made some of his most memorable speeches during the first few months of his premiership, when Britain came under threat of German invasion (Image by Getty Images)" /> 2. “We shall never surrender” Winston Churchill, 1940 By June 1940, it seemed that Hitler had won his war. He had conquered Poland; launched a devastating assault in Denmark and Norway; and attacked in the west, invading the Netherlands and Belgium, and storming through northern France to cut off the British army and much of the French. It was only a matter of time before France was forced to surrender and German troops entered triumphantly into Paris. To any impartial observer, it seemed obvious that Britain had no choice but to seek a peace settlement with Hitler. But Winston Churchill, Britain’s pugnacious and controversial new prime minister, decided to ignore those pressing him to do just that. In an electrifying speech to the House of Commons on 4 June 1940, later broadcast on the BBC, he declared that Britain would fight on and never surrender – that “we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be”. Churchill knew that Britain’s navy and air force would make a German invasion hazardous, though not impossible, and that the only chance of defeating Nazism was to keep going until the United States could join the war. His words defined the stubborn defiance and ‘Dunkirk spirit’, which saved not just Britain but the world from a Nazi victory. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/Mao-ZedongGettyImages-515210286-5fc8355-e1773403801718.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Mao Zedong, wearing a military-style uniform and cap, stands on a balcony and claps while looking over a wide avenue filled with a dense crowd and banners." title="Mao Zedong, seen here in an undated photograph, first used the phrase ‘paper tiger’ during a 1946 interview. The term is now popularly used to describe threats that are less powerful than they might first appear (Image by Getty Images)" /> 3. “The atom bomb is a paper tiger” Mao Zedong, 1946 The dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 redefined the world. Leaders had always been able to plunge their peoples into war, but now they could wipe out whole cities, even countries, with a single order. While the United States was the only one with nuclear capability at first, the Soviet Union was not far behind thanks to communist spies in the west passing nuclear secrets to Moscow. Read more | Reign of the red terror: Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution In an interview with American journalist Anna Louise Strong in 1946, the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, Mao Zedong, described the atom bomb as a “paper tiger”, something that looks more dangerous than it is. Mao meant that all governments depended on the support of the people, and they would never consent to using atomic weapons. The phrase was taken another way: no government would dare use such weapons for fear of provoking a response from the other side. This was the idea behind the doctrine of ‘mutually assured destruction’ during the Cold War, as the power and number of nuclear weapons intensified. Even then, the world came perilously close to disaster on more than one occasion. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/Mandy-RiceGettyImages-1365867502-dd9056f-e1773403905292.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A group of people gathers outside a stone building while several British police officers in traditional helmets stand among them, appearing to manage or escort individuals through the crowd." title="Mandy Rice-Davies (centre left) leaves the Central Criminal Court after testifying at the 1963 trial of her friend Stephen Ward. Questions about the model’s alleged affair with a Tory peer prompted a now-legendary response (Image by Getty Images)" /> 4. “Well, he would, wouldn’t he?” Mandy Rice-Davies, 1963 This ordinary retort marked an unlikely watershed in British social history. Marilyn (better known as Mandy) Rice-Davies was a model and dancer working in London’s Soho, where she met Christine Keeler and her friend and protector, Stephen Ward. A successful osteopath, Ward was well-known in high society, hosting parties and introducing girls like Keeler and Rice-Davies to his well-connected friends, including the Secretary of State for War John Profumo and the Conservative peer Lord Astor. A public scandal ensued when the truth of Ward’s parties was revealed, especially with reports that Keeler had slept both with Profumo and a Russian naval attaché, Eugene Ivanov, which made the affair a diplomatic furore. Rice-Davies was a witness at Ward’s trial. It was widely held at the time that people in high society were trustworthy and honourable, incapable of the lewd behaviour associated with ‘lower’ classes. When it was put to Rice-Davies that Lord Astor denied her claim of an affair, the assumption was that his word was worth more than hers. Her cheeky response – “Well, he would, wouldn’t he?” – suggested that the aristocracy were no more honourable than anyone else. The remark caused a sensation. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/Cassius-ClayGettyImages-545316246-1db1a81-e1773404032921.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A boxer wearing a shiny robe with “CASSIUS CLAY” on the back stands in the ring with both gloved hands raised in triumph as spectators watch from the packed arena." title="Cassius Clay celebrates his win over Doug Jones at Madison Square Garden, March 1963. The boxer, who changed his name to Muhammad Ali the following year, frequently described himself as ‘the Greatest’ (Image by Getty Images)" /> 5. “I am the greatest” Cassius Clay, 1963 Muhammad Ali, who changed his name from Cassius Clay in 1964, was always much more than a boxer: he was a role model for young black people around the world and a major international celebrity, mixing his sporting triumphs with irrepressible charm and wit. Boxing had long been a way for poor Americans to better themselves. Clay, who came from the segregated South, won the light heavyweight gold medal at the age of 18 at the 1960 Rome Olympics before turning professional and starting an immense career that saw him become world heavyweight champ three times. As well as a pugilist, though, Clay was a charismatic self-promoting poet always showing his gifts for trash talking. In 1963, shortly before announcing his conversion to Islam and his new name, he issued a record of rhythmically spoken poetry entitled I Am the Greatest. Ali continued to describe himself proudly as ‘the Greatest’, but he put his reputation and career on the line, and even risked jail, by refusing to serve in the US Army in 1967 as the war in Vietnam raged. His case went to the Supreme Court and Ali became a symbol of growing American opposition to the war, and a figurehead of the civil rights movement. He was now a champion of the dispossessed as well as ‘the Greatest’ in the boxing ring. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/Martin-Luther-KingGettyImages-517357504-1305bdb-e1773404333188.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Martin Luther King Jr. stands at a podium filled with microphones, delivering a speech to a large crowd. People in the background wear uniforms, hats, and formal clothing." title="Martin Luther King Jr delivers his iconic ‘I Have a Dream’ speech during the March on Washington, 1963. The rally is considered a watershed moment in American history (Image by Getty Images)" /> 6. “I have a dream” Dr Martin Luther King Jr, 1963 Martin Luther King Jr’s iconic speech was delivered in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC, an enormous statue of the US president who had ended slavery in the United States. By the 1960s, however, true emancipation was still far off as African Americans faced entrenched legal discrimination and police violence. King, who had made his name leading protests against racial segregation, was speaking to a huge civil rights rally calling for jobs and fair treatment for America’s black population, but his speech went much further than that. Read more | How did the US civil rights movement influence Britain? King’s style of oratory owed much to his background as a Baptist preacher and his imagery, of a dream in which black and white people lived in harmony and friendship – and where his children “will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character” – was in line with the visionary sermons that many of his listeners had heard in church. The power of his words went far beyond the 17 minutes that his speech took and the 250,000 people gathered on that day, 28 August 1963. They became not only a defining moment of the civil rights movement, but of US history. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/Hannah-ArendtGettyImages-135314633-43360a4-e1773404990659.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A person in a dark buttoned shirt with a brooch and patterned trousers reclines against a plain wall, one hand resting beside them holding a cigarette, their gaze angled upward." title="Hannah Arendt poses for a portrait, 1949. The philosopher’s reflections on the atrocities of the Second World War – and the motives behind them – sparked fierce debate (Image by Getty Images)" /> 7. “The banality of evil” Hannah Arendt, 1963 In May 1960, Israel took the world by surprise when its secret service agents kidnapped and abducted a German living in Argentina who gave his name as Ricardo Klement. In fact, he was Adolf Eichmann, one of the key figures in the implementation of the ‘Final Solution’, the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe. He was put on a plane to Israel and in 1961 he faced a criminal trial in Jerusalem. Hannah Arendt, a Jewish German-American writer and academic, asked the New Yorker if she could cover the trial for them. They agreed. In Arendt’s eyes, the bespectacled Eichmann, wearing a cheap suit instead of his Nazi uniform, seemed like any other middle-ranking office clerk; he could just as easily have been working for an insurance company or a bank. She coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to highlight the way evil can flourish not just by good people standing by, but by ordinary people in ordinary jobs carrying out instructions without ever questioning their morality. Her analysis ran into a storm of controversy. Jews were unhappy at her criticisms of what she saw as a show trial by the State of Israel; more recently, Holocaust scholars have pointed out that the viciously antisemitic Eichmann was very far from being a small cog in the machine: he was a proactive and energetic enforcer of the Final Solution, most notably directing the mass murder of the Jewish population of Hungary. However, Arendt’s idea that evil does not need supervillains, but merely enough ordinary people doing their ordinary jobs remains a powerful insight. She gave us the words to describe it. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/BeatlesGettyImages-84999643-9c296eb-e1773405091446.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Four men pose at a busy press event as photographers gather around them. Behind them are large globe‑shaped balloons and clusters of bright red, yellow, and blue balloons. One man holds a sign that reads “LOVE.”" title="The Beatles take part in a press call to promote the Our World television broadcast, in which they performed ‘All You Need is Love’ for the first time. The song’s simple refrain was designed to have international appeal (Image by Getty Images)" /> 8. “All you need is love” The Beatles, 1967 The Beatles were at the height of their fame and influence by the 1967 ‘summer of love’. Pop music had developed into a young people’s lifestyle and outlook that their parents, of the wartime generation, found utterly bewildering. The Beatles did not just produce hit records: they put forward a new philosophy, which overturned the older generation’s assumptions about behaviour, dress and morality. When their album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band appeared in May, it quickly took on cult status. A month later, the group unveiled a new song, ‘All You Need is Love’, as part of the first global live television link-up called Our World, which was watched by an audience of approximately 400 million. The song had been purposely written with simple repeated lyrics to appeal to the international viewers, and so summarised the new attractive, easy-to-grasp philosophy in clear terms. As the song itself says, “It’s easy”. Older heads might point out that life needs a lot more than love, but in 1967 few young people were listening. Pop music has been one of the defining cultural influences that mark the postwar world: it has overcome generational, social, political and cultural barriers with its infectious rhythms and simple messages. While ‘All You Need is Love’ may have always been an ideal, it has endured. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/Neil-ArmstrongGettyImages-1512723-8b06da7-e1773405173996.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A photograph of a ridged footprint in a grey clay-like floor" title="A close-up photograph of Neil Armstrong’s famous boot print, 1969. The astronaut’s first words after stepping onto the Moon became instantly iconic – despite a slight stumble in delivery (Image by Getty Images)" /> 9. “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind” Neil Armstrong, 1969 That, at any rate, is what Neil Armstrong meant to say when he stepped down from the lunar module onto the surface of the Moon on 20 July 1969. Either he slipped on his words, or they were obscured by a bleep in the transmission, because the version heard back on Earth did not have that crucial “a”. It did not seem to matter. Armstrong was right: it was a giant leap, though at the time no one quite knew in what direction. Space exploration had excited people around the world since the Soviet Union’s Sputnik satellite in 1957 and putting a human being on the Moon had seemed the ultimate prize. Where was all this endeavour to go after that? Science fiction suggested a world of space voyages, but the reality was to be much closer to home. Space technology moved into the world of satellites, first for telecommunications and later for everything from television to meteorology and traffic management. Inevitably, the military potential of space was quickly recognised. The Moon missions opened space up as a further area of operation for the nations of the Earth, so Armstrong was right, even if he got his words wrong. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/ThatcherGettyImages-1215188595-b93ab08-e1773405339874.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A woman with wavy, permed hair sits at a microphone, wearing a black and white patterned suit and white shirt with V neck collar. She has large pearl earrings and sits against a blue background" title="Margaret Thatcher addresses a press conference at Conservative Party HQ in 1987 – the year her interview with Woman’s Own magazine sparked controversy (Image by Getty Images)" /> 10. “There is no such thing as society” Margaret Thatcher, 1987 The Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s first woman prime minister, ushered in a revolution. Her immediate aim was to resolve the economic problems into which the country had sunk in the 1970s, which she did by promoting a new philosophy based on free enterprise and the rolling-back of state control. In an interview for Woman’s Own magazine, Thatcher outlined her belief that, ultimately, it is not for the government to resolve people’s problems; individuals and families must look after themselves and their neighbours. In that sense, she said, “There is no such thing as society”. The phrase provoked a storm of controversy. Supporters applauded her emphasis on individuals, while opponents denounced what they saw as her uncaring attitude towards the Welfare State, which many regarded as the most significant change in 20th-century British society. The phrase encapsulated two completely different political philosophies: a belief in the power of the state as a force for good or as an enervating drain on the people’s energies. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/ReaganGettyImages-514906046-9ed3ad8-e1773405425624.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Ronald Reagan delivers a speech at a podium surrounded by microphones, seated officials behind him. A section of the Berlin Wall stands in the background with a German warning sign." title="Ronald Reagan makes his famous challenge to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987. The Berlin Wall was toppled two years later (Image by Getty Images)" /> 11. “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Ronald Reagan, 1987 The postwar Soviet Union seemed a menacing, repressive world, in the grip of its secret police and ruled by a set of grim-faced old men in coats, so the emergence in 1985 of Mikhail Gorbachev as general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party came as a pleasant surprise. Not only did he seem more human and approachable, but he was clearly open to a closer and warmer relationship with the west. Even Mrs Thatcher commented that she liked Mr Gorbachev: he was a man she could do business with. Gorbachev embarked on a wholesale reordering of Soviet life and institutions, beginning with perestroika (restructuring) and notably glasnost (openness), encouraging people to speak openly and honestly about their lives, their past and even their government. Western countries sat up and took notice. Was it changing into a western-style democracy? Were the days of tanks rolling into eastern European capitals to crush liberation movements truly over? Read more | Did Ronald Reagan 'Make America Great Again'? US president Ronald Reagan decided to test him. In 1987, the president gave a speech at the Berlin Wall, the most potent symbol of the Soviet Union’s hostile rejection of the west. He welcomed the changes Gorbachev was making, but called on him to take the most far-reaching step of all: “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” No one really believed he would, but it was thought that it might force Gorbachev onto the defensive. What no one predicted was that only two years later a mass movement of people, taking their cue from Gorbachev’s glasnost policy and calling openly for freedom of speech and movement, would force communist governments from power. When in May 1989 a journalist asked Gorbachev if the wall might come down, he replied, smilingly, “Why not?” By the end of the year, it had. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/Hillary-ClintonGettyImages-526599660-40d8ade-e1773405542290.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Hilary Clinton, with shoulder length coiffed blonde hair, wearing a dark top and a pink, white and gold neck scarf. She stands in front of a microphone, and is turned towards the left, looking at someone out of frame" title="First Lady Hillary Clinton addresses a news conference in 1995. Her declaration that “women’s rights are human rights” helped bring the cause of gender equality into the global spotlight (Image by Getty Images)" /> 12. “Women’s rights are human rights and human rights are women’s rights” Hillary Rodham Clinton, 1995 The feminist movement had used a shorter version of this phrase since the 1980s, but it entered the mainstream when Hillary Clinton, wife of American president Bill Clinton, spoke at a United Nations World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. The transformation of the position of women in society was one of the most striking changes to take place in the 20th century. In Britain and the US, the century had begun with the celebrated campaign for women to have the right to vote, and by the end feminism had developed as a movement and philosophy that sought to transform human society along the lines of equality. Clinton was an apt figure to give voice to the aim. She was a lawyer who, in 1974, had been part of the Watergate investigation team that brought down President Richard Nixon. But her husband’s own presidency meant that she had to perform what was essentially a ceremonial role. She could support Bill in his duties, but could she hold office herself? As long as women’s rights continued to be regarded as a category on their own, it seemed that women would never be accepted as equals – hence her impassioned iteration that women’s rights are not just rights for women: they have always been basic human rights. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/harry-potter-and-the-sorcerers-stoneB8C7su-215cbe1-e1773405675845.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A young boy with dark hair and round glasses stands in a snowy street, dressed in a black robe with a yellow and maroon badge on his chest and a yellow and maroon striped scarf around his neck. On one arm he is holding a white owl" title="Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) with his trusty owl, Hedwig, in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001). JK Rowling’s wizarding franchise rapidly became a global phenomenon – despite opposition from some Christian groups (Image by Warner Bros.)" /> 13. “You’re a wizard, Harry” Robbie Coltrane (as Rubeus Hagrid), 2001 When JK Rowling’s debut novel Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was published in 1997, it was regarded as simply another imaginative children’s book from a first-time author. As word went round school playgrounds, however, the popularity of the series grew. Soon, crowds were gathering at bookshops to buy each new title as soon it appeared, along with Harry Potter audiobooks, videogames, tie-in toys and merchandise. Then in 2001, the first of a highly successful series of Harry Potter feature films made its way on to the big screen. What had begun as a series of children’s books had become a global phenomenon, with the words “You’re a wizard, Harry” (spoken by Hagrid actor Robbie Coltrane in the first film adaptation) becoming part of cinematic history. Hogwarts, Harry’s school of witchcraft and wizardry, is clearly a nostalgic throwback to the days of Britain’s famous private schools, with their uniforms, dormitories and special trains. But much of her message is more universal: a passionate defence of honesty and integrity against the dark forces of evil in the world, including those to be found in people who sit in authority. The formidable but kindly headmaster Albus Dumbledore is a sort of Old Testament prophet; the clash between Harry, whose parents gave their lives for him, and Voldemort (aka Tom Riddle), a boy who has given in to his dark side, is a modern stand-off between Jesus and Lucifer, the fallen angel. Did Harry Potter come to embody a substitute religion in the secular post-Christian western world? Certainly, fundamentalist Christians denounced the books and forbade their children from reading them. We can be sure that historians will be looking closely at the Harry Potter phenomenon for many years to come. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/For-EveryoneG5BD6F-9c59143-e1773405794351.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A packed stadium at night glows with blue and purple lighting. In the upper stands, illuminated seats spell out “THIS IS FOR EVERYONE,” while a central stage features a house‑shaped structure with projected visuals." title="Tim Berners-Lee’s cameo appearance at the 2012 Olympics ended with the words “This is for everyone” being beamed around the stadium. The words were intended to convey the democratic ideals behind the World Wide Web (Image by Alamy)" /> 14. “This is for everyone” Tim Berners-Lee, 2012 One of the most significant moments during the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics was also one of the quietest. After a stunning display that charted rural Britain’s transformation into an industrial powerhouse came a dance sequence depicting a 21st-century house party, complete with a full-size replica of a suburban home at its centre. Then, the house lifted up to reveal a middle-aged man sitting at his computer sending out a tweet: "This is for everyone.” The man was Tim Berners-Lee, and in 1989 he laid the foundations for what would become the World Wide Web. The web transformed the modern world just as totally as the Victorian industrialists had. Computers had always been huge, complex objects, the preserve of scientists and governments; until fairly recently, the most sophisticated item that people carried around with them was a pocket calculator. What Berners-Lee did was to create a way that would connect computers with each other, anywhere in the world, whether they were in people’s bedrooms or in the headquarters of international agencies. Suddenly, ordinary people had access to pretty much anything they might want to see. This was a democratic revolution as well as a technological one. As any government knows, access to information is power, and it was now in the hands of ordinary people everywhere. Tech companies grew from small gatherings of like-minded geeks into formidable multinational powers, able to face down governments. Of course, such power also brings responsibility, but Berners-Lee’s message at the Olympics was that the web should always be for everyone. A simple message – but a truly revolutionary one.
12 modern trends with surprisingly ancient roots
From dance competitions to viral memes, there are some features of everyday life that feel firmly rooted in the 21st century. However, there are plenty of fads and crazes that are much older than you think, as Hilary Mitchell reveals
1. Cooking competitions Long before MasterChef, cooks in medieval Iraq also competed for culinary glory. In the 10th century, a collection of recipes from eighth and ninth-century Baghdad were compiled into a recipe book called Kitāb al-ṭabīkh (‘The Book of Dishes’) by Ibn Sayyār al-Warrāq. As well as recipes, the book also includes fascinating accounts of what could be described as very early cookery competitions. They weren’t long-running, weekly tournaments like those we see on TV, but they were still prestigious culinary events, usually staged in elite households, which allowed rival chefs to showcase their talents. In one section that sounds very much like a challenge from The Great British Bake Off, al-Warrāq describes banquets where different chefs’ versions of the same dish were compared and judged by their patrons. There’s also another anecdote (recounted in later culinary literature) about the caliph al-Ma’mūn challenging his cooks to produce dishes using unexpected ingredients – like an early version of Ready Steady Cook. 2. Online gossip These days, gossip pages like Deuxmoi – a popular, mostly anonymous Instagram account that shares insider info about well-known people – are a staple of social media sites. However, it’s certainly not a new phenomenon. People in ancient Mesopotamia were gossiping about the elite and writing down the most salacious rumours about them. Cuneiform tablets written around 1800–1760 BC record a Mesopotamian mayor’s shocking affair with a married woman. An official spills the tea, writing to the king to say that the mayor of the city has been “lying with another man’s wife”, and explaining that the citizens are all outraged; everyone in the city is talking about the scandal. The tablet is part of a group of Old Babylonian cuneiform tablets found at ancient Mari – modern Tell Hariri – in Syria, the majority of which take the form of messages sent to King Zimri-Lim about various goings-on in his country. It’s not quite an Instagram gossip column, but it’s clearly an early example of a very personal scandal spreading through social networks. Read more | Was there a real Lady Whistledown? The true stories of Mrs Crackenthorpe, Bridgerton’s scandal sheets and the golden age of gossip 3. Memes Memes, defined in 1976 by Richard Dawkins as a cultural idea, behaviour or style that spreads by imitation, are usually thought to be a uniquely online, modern phenomenon. However, plenty of things went ‘viral’ long before the internet. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/3-Memes-0c8f60e-e1772539948697.png" width="620" height="413" alt="A medieval manuscript illustration shows a knight in armor kneeling with a sword raised toward a large snail with a patterned shell. The scene is set inside an ornate decorated initial with gold, red, and blue detailing, and stylized foliage extending into the margins" title="A knight fights a snail in the Gorleston Psalter, c14th century. The image became a popular motif in medieval texts (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> Some of the strongest contenders for the earliest memes are the recurring images that medieval manuscript illuminators often filled their margins with: everything from rabbits jousting with snails to cats playing bagpipes. These weren’t random; they were part of a shared visual language that spread from one workshop or region to another – much like memes do online today – partly due to travelling artisans. The knight versus snail motif appears in manuscripts from England, France and Flanders between the 13th and 14th centuries. No one knows exactly what it symbolised; perhaps cowardice or another form of social satire, but the fact that it appears repeatedly, across borders, suggests it went ‘viral’ among medieval illustrators, in a way. 4. Customer complaints Long before review sites or consumer watchdogs, people were already putting their grievances in writing. The world’s oldest known commercial customer complaint comes from ancient Mesopotamia, around 1750 BC, and survives on a clay tablet now in the British Museum. It was written by a copper merchant named Nanni, who was furious with another trader, Ea-nāṣir, for delivering substandard copper ingots and treating his messenger rudely. “You have treated me with contempt,” Nanni scolds in Akkadian cuneiform, before demanding the return of his money and warning that he will never accept such poor service again. The infamous Ea-nāṣir lived in the city of Ur (modern Tell el-Muqayyar, southern Iraq) and his house, excavated by archaeologists in the 20th century, contained dozens of tablets relating to his copper trade. Many of them record debts and complaints, suggesting that his bad customer service may have been a bit of a pattern. The famous tablet, with its dry fury and insistence on fair dealing, certainly reads like a modern complaint email, which in turn has led to Ea-nāṣir becoming a popular meme about bad customer service nearly 4,000 years later. 5. OnlyFans OnlyFans – an online platform founded in 2016 where creators share exclusive, paywalled and often pornographic content for subscribers – might seem distinctively modern. However, like the other examples on this list, the concept of subscribing for privileged access or intimacy is nothing new. In classical Greece, higher-status hetairai (courtesans) cultivated circles of wealthy patrons who paid retainers or gave gifts for their company, conversation, and, sometimes, sex. Unlike lower-status sex workers (pornai), these women were admired for their education, wit and influence, with some even able to move in elite, male-dominated political circles that were closed to most Athenian women. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/5-OnlyFans-2CG1KKR-dbeeca0-e1772540157727.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A 19th-century painting showing Aspasia of Miletus (left), perhaps the most famous hetaira in classical Greece (Image by Alamy)" title="A 19th-century painting showing Aspasia of Miletus (left), perhaps the most famous hetaira in classical Greece (Image by Alamy)" /> The most famous was arguably Aspasia of Miletus, companion to the statesman Pericles, who was celebrated for her eloquence and rumoured to have advised some of Athens’ greatest thinkers, according to later writers. Satirical poets mocked her as a mere brothel-keeper, but others respected her intellect. Read more | From goat eyelids to bread: history's 12 strangest sex toys 6. 'Diss' tracks When you think of ‘diss tracks’ (short for ‘disrespect’), your mind probably conjures up the combative hip-hop feuds of the 1980s and 90s, when angry lyrics sometimes spilled into real-world violence. But the practice of using music to mock, ridicule or attack rivals has a much longer history. Well before rap battles and chart-topping beefs, composers and songwriters were crafting satirical songs aimed squarely at opponents. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/6-Diss-Tracks-KREKX4-30bfeef-e1772540262384.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A colourful illustration of a man dressed like Uncle Sam riding a galloping horse, kicking up clouds of dust. He wears a tall feathered hat, a blue coat with white stars, and red‑and‑white striped trousers. Behind him, a crowd of men, women, and children cheer and wave hats, with an American flag flying on a pole among green trees and a blue sky." title="A cartoon depicting Uncle Sam on horseback. One of the best-known diss tracks is the 18th-century ‘Yankee Doodle’, which mocked American colonists as being uncultured (Image by Alamy)" /> In the 18th century, for example, musical ridicule was a common feature of political life. One of the best-known examples is ‘Yankee Doodle’, first sung by British troops during the Seven Years’ War to mock American colonists as uncultured and naive. The famous line “Stuck a feather in his cap / And called it Macaroni” lampooned the colonists’ attempts to imitate London fashions, portraying them as pretentious fools. It’s not exactly ‘Hit ’Em Up’ by Tupac Shakur, but the aim was still to ‘diss’ the enemy. 7. Personal trainers Even if you don’t get to the gym as often as you’d like, your fitness ambitions have a very proud and ancient heritage. In ancient Greece, fitness wasn’t just about physical strength; it was a cornerstone of culture, identity and civic pride. The Greeks believed in the ideal of kalokagathia, the harmony of body and mind, and saw exercise as essential to both moral and intellectual development. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/7-Personal-trainers-2CE72A7-dad62a3-e1772540528580.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="illustration in the style of ancient Greek pottery showing several human figures and horses arranged around a central warrior. The central figure holds a shield patterned like animal skin and a spear. Other figures stand or ride horses around him, each labeled with Greek inscriptions. The scene is rendered in black and orange tones with detailed linework." title=". Greek athletic sports and festivals . Fig. 173.?R.-f. kylix. Canino Coll. the ground are planted poles and picks. The poles are usedas javelins for practice, and perhaps as measuring-rods; or asposts to mark the lines from which the jump is practised, o" /> Gymnasia, open-air training grounds where men gathered to run, wrestle and practice discus or javelin, were also vibrant social hubs, much like today’s gyms. Athletes even trained with personal trainers (paidotribai) and coaches (gymnastai) who supervised their charges and advised them on diet and exercise. In many ways, our modern obsession with health, aesthetics and community around fitness is a direct descendant of this ancient Greek ideal: proof that the pursuit of a buff body has a long history. Our ancestors couldn’t post their rock-hard abs on social media, but statues of the time preserve the ideal of physical perfection they were striving for. 8. Influencers The next time you see a well-dressed young person doing a complicated viral dance in public while their friend records them on their phone, take a moment to contemplate the original ‘influencer’, Empress Theodora of Byzantium, who lived in the sixth century. She was the wife of Emperor Justinian I and rose from humble origins as an actress to become one of the most powerful – and influential – women in the Byzantine empire. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/8-Influencers-GettyImages-122221539-LEAD-WL-d7c4886-e1772541520864.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A Byzantine-style mosaic showing a central crowned woman in a richly patterned robe, flanked by two attendants. The attendant on the left wears a patterned garment and jewelry, while the one on the right holds a gold chalice and wears a white robe with geometric designs. The background is filled with gold and green architectural motifs" title="Empress Theodora of Byzantium (centre) presented a carefully curated image of herself, much like modern-day influencers (Image by Getty Images)" /> Mosaics and contemporary accounts show her wearing lavish, bejewelled outfits that set the example for court fashion. She was a particular fan of imperial purple (an elite colour manufactured from rare and expensive murex shellfish) as well as heavy jewellery and elaborate headpieces – all of which became aspirational goals for other aristocratic women. Her image was also very carefully curated – demonstrating a blend of sensuality, intellect, and authority – much like a modern social media influencer’s personal brand. 9. Dancing contests Much-loved autumn TV staple Strictly Come Dancing is, in many ways, a more polished, spangly descendant of ancient Greek dance contests. By the sixth century BC, choreographed group dances (choreiai) were central to major religious festivals honouring gods such as Apollo, Athena and Dionysus. Festivals like the City Dionysia and the Panathenaic Festival featured formal dance contests, in which trained groups performed elaborate dances in honour of the deities. These contests were often sponsored by wealthy patrons, and participants were judged and awarded prizes. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/9-Dancing-Contests-2YXX7J9-fb21492-e1772540731582.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A Roman mosaic showing four figures dancing in a circle around a veiled central figure. One person on the right holds a small tablet or scroll. Decorative garlands run along the top, and part of the mosaic on the right is damaged, revealing the surface beneath." title="A group dance depicted in a sixth-century AD mosaic from Ravenna, Italy. Routines like this were an integral part of religious festivals (Image by Alamy)" /> Also, if that wasn’t ancient enough, there’s evidence of ritual dance events much earlier, in the Bronze Age Minoan civilisation (c1600 BC). Frescoes and artefacts from Knossos and Phaistos depict groups of dancers performing in ritual circles, sometimes with acrobatic elements. While there’s no formal evidence that these were competitive in the sense of judged contests, some scholars suggest they may have involved displays of skill or athleticism. Not quite Strictly Come Knossos, but coordinated, organised group dance certainly has a history stretching back over 3,500 years. Read more | Forbidden dances and deadly marathons: 5 facts about the history of dancing 10. Fake news In this age of online misinformation, doctored images and AI videos, we hear a lot about ‘fake news’, but propaganda is nothing new. The use of exaggerated or misleading accounts to shape public perception goes back at least to 1274 BC, with Pharaoh Ramesses II and his so-called ‘victory’ at the battle of Kadesh against the Hittites. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/10-Fake-News-EgyptAbouSimbel6-498c77e-e1772540946949.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A carved ancient Egyptian relief showing a large standing figure with one arm raised holding a weapon and the other gripping a smaller, kneeling figure. Additional subdued figures appear below. Hieroglyphic inscriptions frame the scene in vertical and horizontal bands." title="A relief portraying Ramesses II slaying an enemy and trampling another — part of an ancient PR campaign" /> In reality, the battle was a stalemate. Despite this, Ramesses commissioned bombastic, braggadocious inscriptions and temple reliefs across Egypt depicting him single-handedly defeating the enemy, crushing chariots, and leading triumphant processions. These highly flattering depictions were essentially ancient PR: they reinforced his image as an unbeatable warrior-king for anyone who saw them, leaving a lasting impression of triumph, power and invulnerability that didn’t match the facts. 11. Nail art and manicures When you get your nails done, you’re participating in a tradition that stretches back thousands of years, to the civilisations of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. Archaeological evidence suggests that male Babylonian warriors tinted their nails with kohl and crushed minerals before battle: black or green for nobles, lighter shades for other fighters. In Egypt, nails were tinted with henna, with deeper red shades signalling higher status. Cleopatra, according to later sources, favoured a deep crimson. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/11-Nail-art-LadyTjepu-GoogleArtProject-copy-6d5e038-e1772541183187.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A fragment of an ancient Egyptian wall painting showing a woman in profile facing left. She wears a long black wig with a decorative headband, a white pleated dress, and blue‑and‑gold jewellery. She holds one hand up in front of her face, showing her painted nails" title="An artwork from the 14th century BC shows an Egyptian noblewoman examining her painted nails" /> Wealthy elites did not paint their own nails; attendants or servants prepared henna pastes, shaped nails with small metal tools, and applied the coatings. Tomb depictions from the New Kingdom (c1500 BC) show servants grooming noblewomen, offering evidence of manicure-like services. While these attendants weren’t professional ‘nail technicians’ in the modern sense, they performed many of the same functions: mixing cosmetic pastes, shaping nails, and applying a pop of colour for aesthetic effect. 12. Cancel culture We hear a lot about so-called ‘cancel culture’ these days, with many people – often outspoken ‘free speech’ advocates with controversial views – claiming their careers have been “ruined” because of a backlash to something they’ve said or done. However, they should probably count themselves lucky that, in 2025, ‘cancellation’ rarely includes formal banishment from your home city, which is the fate that faced ostracised Athenians in the early fifth century BC. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/12-Cancel-culture-AGMAOstrakonThemistocle1-3d1f4f9-e1772541235338.jpg" width="620" height="603" alt="A black‑glazed ancient Greek drinking cup seen from above, with a ring of lightly incised Greek letters etched around the inner rim" title="An ostrakon from 482 BC, reading “Themistocles, son of Neocles”. Anyone whose name was etched onto one of these pottery sherds faced a 10-year exile" /> Ostracism was a formal mechanism that allowed citizens to exile public figures for 10 years. It was intended as a safeguard against tyranny: if an individual was deemed a threat to democracy, the citizen body could vote to remove them without resorting to legal prosecution. Each year, the assembly would decide whether to hold an ostracism; if so, citizens scratched the name of the person they wished to exile onto a pottery sherd called an ostrakon. The ancient sources are slightly unclear, but it seems either a minimum threshold of 6,000 votes was required to validate the process, or a person needed 6,000 votes against them to be banished. Those exiled retained their property and legal rights, returning home once the 10-year period ended; possibly feeling a bit miffed about being shunned for a decade.
"It wasn't very open about its queer connections": the hidden history of the National Trust
Michael Hall speaks to Charlotte Vosper about the long-hidden stories of LGBTQ people whose lives were connected to the properties owned by the National Trust
Charlotte Vosper: In A Queer Inheritance, you explore histories of sexual difference connected to the National Trust. What drew you to those historical figures and their stories? Michael Hall: That goes back a long way. For quite a few years I worked for Country Life magazine, and in that role I wrote articles about country houses. I actually began with one of those I mention in my book: Packwood House in Warwickshire. It was acquired in 1904 by an industrialist for his son, Graham Baron Ash, who spent years renovating and transforming the property. It struck me that he never got married – and the idea that a bachelor might do up a house and then give it to the National Trust to look after seemed quite intriguing. I didn’t really spot that it was part of a pattern until I wrote a similar article on Anglesey Abbey. That’s when I realised that there was a story about the National Trust that hadn’t really been told before. It’s important to mention that I’ve never worked for the Trust, and A Queer Inheritance isn’t an official National Trust book in any way. I don’t speak on the Trust’s behalf – and indeed they may very well disagree with a lot of what I say. The National Trust was founded in 1895, when homosexual acts of ‘gross indecency’ were still illegal in Britain – yet in your book you suggest that the Trust had queer connections from its very beginnings. Can you expand on this? That’s actually quite a complicated question. The origins of the National Trust were rooted in an anxiety about London’s urban poor and how they could be morally improved. Its founders thought that if the urban poor could be given access to architectural and natural beauty, this would do away with what they saw as their worrying vices – of which homosexuality was a rather prominent example. Yet several people on the Trust’s original council and executive committee were in fact queer. They included the 5th Earl of Rosebery, who was worried that he might be named in the Oscar Wilde trials of 1895, and Octavia Hill, who had a long and loving relationship with Harriot Yorke. Can you tell us about some queer landowners connected to the Trust’s estates? William John Bankes, who inherited the great estate of Kingston Lacy in Dorset, had to go into exile in 1841 after he was caught having sex with a guardsman in London’s Green Park. He then redecorated and remodelled the house remotely, while living in Venice. It’s a very interesting story about a gay man shaping a house even when away from home. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/2DYY3JXwebready-4a1b91d-e1772550724428.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A large historic mansion stands behind a wide green lawn, with a central dome flying a flag, tall chimneys, and symmetrical stone façades. Mature trees frame the view, and a few people walk near the building alongside a small green tractor." title="Kingston Lacy in Dorset was redesigned as a classical palace in the 19th century by its owner William John Bankes, who was forced into exile after facing prosecution for a same-sex act. The house is home to his collections of art and Egyptian artefacts (Image by Alamy)" /> In the book I also talk about Clumber Park, site of a lost house that was demolished in 1938. Several generations of the Dukes of Newcastle were based there. One of the 5th Duke’s sons, Lord Arthur Pelham-Clinton, enjoyed relationships with a famous pair of young Victorian men who cross-dressed as Fanny and Stella; later, the 7th Duke, ‘Linny’, was friends with Oscar Wilde. I should emphasise that the book is not primarily about country houses. The National Trust manages a wide range of buildings, one of which is Clouds Hill, a little cottage in Dorset that was home to TE Lawrence (of Arabia). His sexuality has been hugely debated, and I draw my own conclusions about this in the book. Read more | Challenging gender in the Victorian Age: the 'masculine' New Woman and 'effeminate' New Man A site that’s much less controversial is Smallhythe Place in Kent, home of the great 19th and early 20th-century actress Ellen Terry. Her daughter, Edith Craig, was a theatre director of considerable eminence who lived next to that early 16th-century house with two close lesbian friends. They welcomed lots of their likeminded friends there, so you can discover a lot of lesbian history in the 20th century just by visiting Smallhythe. How do we know that these people were queer? Would the historical figures you discuss have understood themselves in that way? Not particularly as queer, I don’t think. But as a historian, you have to look at the story and ask: how can I best interpret this? I think the advantage of the term ‘queer’ is that it avoids attaching very precise labels to people. The word itself goes back to the 16th century, when it just meant odd or unusual. Around the end of the 19th century, though, ‘queer’ was becoming a term of abuse, meaning homosexual. But by the 1980s, ‘queer’ was very much taken back by gay activists, particularly during the Aids crisis, as a way of reclaiming their identity. Today, ‘queer’ is the term preferred by most historians. One of the issues historians face is how to talk about people who didn’t have access to the terms we would use now, such as ‘gay’ or ‘bisexual’. I think ‘queer’ is quite useful because a modern audience knows what that means, but it’s also not imposing something on the past. I also think that the fact it’s clearly anachronistic is actually rather helpful, because it emphasises the difference between the past and the present. There is an amazing amount of argument about these terms, and you can debate these things forever, but as a historian you just have to get on and do the history. And when you do, there’s a lot of anxiety about finding evidence that people were gay – but I think the response must often be, well, what’s your evidence that they were heterosexual? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/2PAFXGXwebready-559b568-e1772551882888.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white portrait of a person with wavy, shoulder‑length hair looking slightly upward against a dark background. Soft lighting highlights their face, creating a dramatic, classic studio style." title="The writer and poet Vita Sackville-West’s same-sex relationships were not always acknowledged (Image by Alamy)" /> How have National Trust estates been influenced by the queer people who lived in them or were connected to them? I wanted to write about places that queer people had shaped in some way – by building them, decorating them, furnishing them or making them part of their life history. This isn’t always obvious. Today, lesbians visit Knole, a country house in Kent, because our contemporary perception of the building is shaped by our knowledge of the relationship between Vita Sackville-West, who lived there, and Virginia Woolf. Yet there’s almost no evidence of Vita’s influence that you can see on the property, other than the original manuscript of Woolf’s Orlando, which she inspired. Returning to TE Lawrence’s Dorset cottage, Clouds Hill, there are just two rooms upstairs, one of which he used as a guest bedroom. In the 1930s, he curiously lined that room with metal foil – a rather art deco look. I became intrigued by the fact that Siegfried Sassoon, a gay writer who was a friend of Lawrence, visited Clouds Hill with his lover, Stephen Tennant. Now, one of the best-known photographs of Stephen (shown above), by Cecil Beaton, shows him in his own bedroom – which he had lined with silver paper. I thought it was an interesting queer link which, as far as I’m aware, hasn’t been made before. It says something about Lawrence’s own sense of identity in terms of sexual orientation, and also about networks. Early on in my research, I began to realise that many of these houses and people linked up. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/0516118webready-d0bc43f-e1772550648873.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a young man wearing a collared shirt, tie and a coat with a large collar. He is looking directly at the camera with a serious look on his face and has a silver foil wallpaper behind him" title="This photo of the socialite Stephen Tennant in front of distinctive silver wallpaper helped piece together the story of TE Lawrence’s Clouds Hill (Image by Topfoto)" /> A lot of the queer people associated with the Trust’s properties were connected, and many came from a privileged background. Is there a relationship here between class and queerness? Yes, definitely – though I don’t write only about elite people in the book. The 5th Marquess of Anglesey, Henry Paget, who lived at the family seat of Plas Newydd on that island, is a good example of such privilege. On the death of his father in 1898 he inherited a huge fortune, which funded his love of dressing up. He liked to put on theatrical productions and go to fancy-dress parties in a very gender-bending way. This got him into the newspapers, and he was laughed at and ridiculed relentlessly. Eventually, he went bankrupt. In a sense, Paget was able to dress up and perform because he was very, very rich. But the downside of his wealth was that he attracted an enormous amount of public curiosity. Endless stories about him appeared in the press. He wouldn’t have suffered such a blow to his reputation if he had been an obscure commoner. Clearly, although privilege could facilitate queer experiences, it could also attract much unwanted attention and expose scandal. Read more | The new radicals: how the Bloomsbury Group transformed British culture When exploring past queer experiences, we are often dealing with the feelings and emotions of historical figures. What sources did you use to explore these? Sources pose a massive question for any historian, but queer topics have always been particularly hedged with problems. Prior to 1967, all homosexual acts between men were illegal in England and Wales [even then, they were permitted only between two consenting adults over the age of 21], and this creates obvious issues with the sources from before that period. But what struck me was that if you go back to the original sources – the contemporary biographies and letter compilations of these late 19th and early 20th-century figures – it seems that many people probably knew what was going on. The Victorians weren’t fools. You just have to tune in when reading the sources, and you’ll learn a lot. The National Trust has faced some backlash for trying to reclaim minority history more widely. How has its attitude towards queer people evolved? Traditionally, the Trust wasn’t very open about its queer connections – but then nobody was terribly open about these issues for many decades. Homophobia played a role in the modernisation of the National Trust. From the 1950s, it began trying to run its houses on a more professional basis, appointing curators. There was a bit of a standoff between the land agents – the traditional men in tweeds who dealt with forestry and estates – and the curators, who dealt with hanging the pictures and arranging the furniture. This division reflected an essential binary within the Trust: whether it should be concerned primarily with places of historic interest or of natural beauty. One of the ways that people who thought the National Trust wasn’t paying enough attention to nature directed criticism against the curators was through homophobia. This made life rather tricky for any gay men within the organisation, and by the 1960s and 70s the Trust attracted considerable criticism, accused of being run by queer aristocratic men. To be fair to the critics, there was considerable truth in that. Beyond its employees, the Trust remained coy about queer connections to the houses it acquired. For example – and it’s extraordinary to say now – it wasn’t until 2008 that any official publication by the National Trust about Sissinghurst, Vita Sackville-West’s later home, also in Kent, mentioned her same-sex relationships. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-182926080webready-82eb4db-e1772551730353.jpeg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A tall brick tower with two conical roofs rises above a landscaped garden of trimmed bushes, flowers, and a wide lawn. Climbing greenery covers part of the structure, and a flag flies from the top. Tree branches and a wrought‑iron gate frame the scene under a bright, partly cloudy sky." title="The Tower at Sissinghurst Castle is set in the gardens designed by Vita Sackville-West and her husband, Harold Nicolson (Image by Getty Images)" /> So it’s only pretty recently that the organisation has been open about this kind of history. In 2017, it made a big effort to catch up and tell these stories, and I think generally there was a feeling that this was going in the right direction. It did, however, bring up an interesting dilemma. Objections were raised by relatives and friends of some of the people who were being described as queer, criticising the National Trust for ‘outing’ them. Read more | From the ancient world to the 1969 Stonewall Riots: a brief guide to LGBT+ history I don’t think that it makes any sense to talk about historical figures in terms of ‘outing’ – because, really, if you object to somebody in the past being described as queer, or raising the question about whether or not they were what we would now call gay, that might imply that you find homosexuality shameful. It’s interesting that the controversy around ‘outing’ these historical figures hasn’t applied so much to queer women. I don’t think people find women’s sexuality as threatening as they find men’s sexuality. And it’s most often men who get upset about other men being described as gay. Look at Lawrence of Arabia: dozens of biographies have been written about him, almost all by men and almost all hostile to the idea that he was gay. What impact do you hope A Queer Inheritance will have? I hope that people will realise that queer history is a very rich subject, and that there’s a huge amount more that can be said about the queer lives connected to the National Trust. Everyone I’ve spoken to about my book says: “Oh, but you haven’t said anything about X.” So, there’s lots more to explore, and different approaches that could be taken. A woman or a young person would have written a completely different book, I think. This article was first published in the February 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
Inside Britain's first refugee camp: a 300-year history of immigration
"This was the site for what may have been Britain’s first refugee camp", writes Kavita Puri
Blackheath in south-east London has a rich history. It was a rallying point for both the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381 and the Kentish rebellion of 1450. Monarchs through the ages have passed through. But what is less known is that it was also the site for what may have been Britain’s first refugee camp. In 1709, army tents were temporarily erected in Blackheath to give shelter to some of the estimated 13,000 German refugees who had arrived in Britain from the Palatinate, which is the modern-day Rhineland. There were also camps in Camberwell, Clerkenwell and Greenwich. Initially, the refugees were supported with charitable donations. Many arriving were poor and they spoke a different language, but they were viewed as Protestants fleeing persecution from oppressive Catholic regimes. English parishes raised around £20,000 to support the Palatine refugees. The Rhineland had suffered significantly during years of warfare. Most recently, it had been invaded by King Louis XIV of France in 1707. However, when the Palatine arrivals came to England, there was not a particular ongoing dispute making them flee. As part of the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, the state was tolerant of Catholics, Lutherans and Calvinists. The ruling ‘Elector’ was Catholic, yet both Catholics and Protestants used the most important church in the city of Heidelberg, the Heiliggeistkirche (Church of the Holy Spirit), as a place of worship. Read more | Your guide to the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 When the British government took a census of the people arriving from Germany, the authorities realised that about a third were Catholic. The reasons they were coming, it turned out, were complex. Many of the refugees had indeed been affected by religious persecution. But others were travelling in search of economic opportunities. They were escaping bad harvests, high food prices, poor prospects. And there were those who wanted to journey on, to America. Britain in 1709 was also facing its own economic difficulties. The country’s involvement in the War of the Spanish Succession had disrupted trade and pushed up prices. The numbers of people relying on charity through the Poor Law had increased. There were concerns that the Palatines were draining the economy, taking jobs away from the English poor. And although the newcomers were largely Protestants, they were not members of the Church of England and so could pose a threat to the nation’s security. Tradesmen and the labouring poor were especially suspicious. Politicians amplified a sense of fear that also found expression in pamphlets and newspapers. A report in The Daily Courant in August 1709 said: “They have not left their native land because their prince’s government is more intolerable than others… No, ’tis because their country is so unhappily situate, that it has felt the invenom’d rage of the enemy, and been expos’d to the calamities of war, more than any other.” Read more | Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "A UK museum that tells the long, rich history of migration is long overdue" In the end, many of the Palatines were eventually resettled across the Atlantic. They joined other German speakers to become the largest single group, aside from enslaved Africans, to enter the American colonies between 1680 and 1780. Around 3,000 Palatines were shipped to Ireland. Some made their way back to their homes in the Rhineland, preferring to be there than left begging on the streets in England. A few towns, such as Liverpool and Perth, had agreed to take in some settlers. Others found new homes in parts of rural Lancashire, but most local corporations refused to take in any newcomers. And yet for all the suspicion directed at the Palatines, there were those who tried to emphasise the advantages in offering them a home. A publication of 1710, The State of the Palatines for Fifty Years Past to this Present Time, said: “In the whole they appear to be an innocent, laborious, peaceable, healthy and ingenious people; and may be rather reckon’d a blessing than a burden to any nation.” Debates around immigration in the 18th century, it seems, weren’t so different to today. This column was first published in the February 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
I’ve just been to Europe’s weirdest theme park – and came face to face with Josef Stalin
There aren’t many theme parks that place statues of Soviet leaders next to Snow White and her seven dwarfs, but you’ll find one in southern Lithuania. Keith Lowe takes us on a tour of one of Europe’s most bizarre – and controversial – tourist attractions
I am standing in a clearing in a Lithuanian forest, surrounded by guard towers and electrified fences. To all intents and purposes, it looks like I’m in a Soviet prison camp. Up above me a loudspeaker barks out orders in Russian. I hurry along a corridor of barbed wire. Up ahead, peeping ominously through the trees, I can see the barrel of an anti-aircraft gun. But all is not as it seems. It doesn’t take long to realise that the loudspeaker is playing some sort of recording on a loop. The guards in the towers are not real either, but poorly disguised mannequins in theatre costume. And who are they guarding? Beneath them, in the barbed wire enclosure, is a row of Communist statues and half a dozen grazing llamas. Further along there are emus, cockatoos, a depressed-looking brown bear, and some statues of mass murderers. As for the gun, when I reach it, I discover that the only thing it is guarding is a children’s playground. Rifles and roundabouts, cockatoos and cattle-trucks, Lenin and llamas: welcome to Grūtas Park, Europe’s weirdest open-air museum. Its combination of terror and kitsch is so controversial that it almost got shut down. I first came here in 2018 as part of my research for a study of Second World War monuments. But I felt compelled to return, because I still can’t quite believe that this place actually exists. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/1DSC1437-Lenin-Llamas-05-18c368a-e1772191107175.jpg" width="1506" height="1000" alt="A photograph showing a white llama grazing on the grass alongside a tall stone marble statue of a bust of man. In the background is a lake, several trees and a brown llama laying on the ground" title="A llama grazes next to a bust of Vladimir Lenin at Grūtas Park, Lithuania. The unconventional visitor attraction, opened in 2001, is filled with relics of the former Soviet Union (Image by Keith Lowe)" /> A brutal past Grūtas Park has its roots in Lithuania’s very troubled history. Like several of its Baltic neighbours, Lithuania began the 20th century as part of Russia and only gained its independence in the chaotic aftermath of the First World War. Just over 20 years later, at the beginning of the Second World War, it was invaded by Soviet troops all over again. Then came the Nazis, followed once again by the Soviets three years later – and with each new invasion came new brutality. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/42Y7B3TJ-ac517fe-e1772189389657.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white historical photograph of several military trucks driving down a city street lined with bare trees and tall buildings. The open‑back trucks are filled with uniformed soldiers wearing helmets, seated closely together as the convoy moves forward" title="Soviet troops enter the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, in June 1940. The country would be invaded by Nazi Germany a year later (Image by Alamy)" /> In 1945, the country was swallowed whole into the Soviet Union. Anyone who refused to accept the nation’s new Stalinist rulers was arrested, deported to Siberia, imprisoned or executed. Tens of thousands of Lithuanians resisted this new oppression. They took to the forests and fought pitched battles against the combined forces of the Red Army and the Soviet secret police but in the end the uprising was brutally crushed: according to the Museum of Genocide Victims in Vilnius, around 300,000 Lithuanians were sent to Soviet gulags between 1945 and 1950, where between a third and a half of them died. Read more | Why did the Soviet Union adopt the hammer and sickle, and how did it become a symbol of communist revolution? The Soviets then embarked on a program of Russification throughout the country. Russian speakers began moving into Lithuanian territories in large numbers; their descendants still live there today. Lithuanian culture was thoroughly purged of its bourgeois influences, and replaced by Socialist literature, art and architecture. Statues of Soviet heroes began to spring up in every town square, along with victory monuments and memorials to the glory of the Red Army. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/5GettyImages-839288220-170ae8f-e1772189538619.jpg" width="1500" height="1001" alt="A black‑and‑white photograph of a neatly arranged camp made up of small, identical buildings with pitched roofs and white picket fences. The buildings sit in rows on either side of a straight central path that leads to a decorative entrance structure with patterned columns. A few people walk along the paths or stand near the buildings. The surrounding landscape is flat and open, with only a few distant structures visible beyond the camp." title="A Soviet gulag in the Komi Republic, in what is now northwest Russia. Around 300,000 Lithuanians were sent to such camps between 1945 and 1950 (Image by Getty Images)" /> Marx and mushrooms When the country finally regained its independence in 1990, almost all the monuments to Lenin and other Communist figures were torn down. Countless statues were decapitated, cut into pieces with blowtorches, or crushed into rubble. Some were even dynamited. In an attempt to save some of these sculptures for posterity, the new Lithuanian government decided to rescue some of them, with the vague idea that they might one day go on display in a museum somewhere. They invited institutions to bid for the right to display the statues, but unfortunately none of the nation’s museums was willing to take the project on without some kind of state funding. There was only one bid – from an entrepreneur named Viliumas Malinauskas – that did not ask for any government money at all. Malinauskas offered to pay all the transport, maintenance and restoration costs out of his own pocket. He was duly awarded the contract. This was where the controversy began. Because Malinauskas was not a historian, an art critic or a museum professional – or indeed anyone who had any background in this kind of work. In fact, he was a former wrestling champion who made his living as a mushroom farmer. He now has a multi-million-dollar business exporting his mushrooms all over the world. Some of his proposals for the sculpture park were quite bizarre. He wanted to build a special railway line, so that tourists from Vilnius could be brought here on cattle trucks, as if they were being deported to a Soviet-era gulag. He wanted to hire actors who would pretend to be soldiers, herding the tourists onto the trains. For the full gulag experience, Grūtas Park itself would be surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers, and the monuments would be displayed as if they were part of a Siberian prison camp. Unsurprisingly, critics began to call Malinauskas’s project a “Stalin theme park”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/6GettyImages-805141-514324c-e1772189666539.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A man in a blue suit and red patterned tie sits outdoors on a large stone bust of a bearded man. His hand rests on the top of the sculpture. Beside him is another stone bust of a different bearded figure. Both sculptures are set on the ground in a wooded area with tall evergreen trees in the background." title="Grūtas Park’s founder, Viliumas Malinauskas, poses for the camera in 2001. The former wrestler wanted to build a special railway line so that tourists could travel to the park as though they were being transported to a gulag (Image by Getty Images)" /> It did not take long for the complaints to come rolling in. Local politicians opposed the building of the park. National politicians opposed the building of the rail line. A petition was drawn up denouncing the whole idea of his sculpture park, which was signed by Catholic Church officials, national NGOs, prominent academics, art professors and over a million other people around the world. “This part of history is full of suffering,” said one member of parliament, Juozas Galdikas, in 2000. “It should not be used for show business.” Read more | Nazino was Stalin’s worst labour gulag. Its inmates knew it by another name: Cannibal Island Perhaps the strongest voice of opposition came from former victims of the regime. More than 30 groups of former partisans and political prisoners banded together to protest about the sculptures going on display. They accused Malinauskas of trying to profit from their misery and described the statues as “monsters from a horror film”. Some of them even went on hunger strike. “Imagine yourself as a resident in a small village,” said one former independence fighter named Leonas Kerosierius, “and someone came and attacked your village, killed your brother and raped your daughter. Would you allow your neighbour to build a park for these executioners and rapists, or make money off these crimes?” MPs pushed for a vote in parliament to take back the statues and keep them in State hands, and their resolution was accepted by a majority. But their victory was short-lived, because it was overturned by the Constitutional Court: Malinauskas had won the government contract fair and square, and Parliament had no right to take it away from him simply on a matter of taste. The most they could do was to create a government watchdog to oversee the construction of the sculpture park. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/2GettyImages-870579120-2d552aa-e1772189931245.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph of 5 stone busts of men in a line. Behind them is a forest of tall fir trees" title="A small portion of the park’s historic busts. From left to right: Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Vincas Mickevičius (Lithuanian communist leader) and Joseph Stalin (Image by Getty Images)" /> The whole controversy quickly became international news. Not only did it feature in newspapers throughout the Baltic countries, but also in other parts of Europe. It even made the newspapers in America, parts of Asia and Australia. “Miss the Soviet Era? Come to Stalin World” ran the headline in The Sydney Morning Herald. Snow White and Stalin Grūtas Park officially opened to the public in 2001 and immediately proved a hit with visitors from all over Lithuania and beyond. Even before the official opening it had already seen around 100,000 visitors. Since then, it has added to its collection and become quite a well-established tourist destination. People still occasionally call this place ‘Stalin World’, but there is actually only one full-size statue of Stalin in the whole park. I found him just beyond the zoo, peeping out between the trees like some fairytale troll. (The comparison to a fairytale is not made randomly: in a nearby glade, closer to the children’s playground, there is also a set of sculptures representing Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The difference between folk tale and reality is not always scrupulously delineated here.) It is easy to see why so many people became upset when the creation of this park was first announced. Many dissidents had spent their whole lives struggling against the Soviet system. In 1991 they had torn down these icons of Soviet power with great joy: it must have been deeply painful to see them so lovingly restored and put back on their pedestals, regardless of the setting. The resurrection of Stalin’s statue was perhaps the most painful thing of all. This man had been responsible for tens of millions of deaths across eastern Europe, and the enslavement of hundreds of thousands of Lithuanians. He had not been on public display for decades. (This particular statue had been taken down by the Communists themselves, back in 1960.) And yet here he was, standing in a sunny glade, waiting for tourists to come and take selfies with him. Read more | Cold War summits: how USA & USSR leaders worked to end the conflict Critics pointed to a worrying trend in contemporary Russia for the rehabilitation of Stalin’s memory, with brand new memorials to him being raised in many parts of Russia, particularly since the start of the current war with Ukraine. What if this trend were to spread to Lithuania and beyond? What if Grūtas Park, too, were to become a 21st-century shrine to this monstrous dictator? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/P1020458-Snow-White-7-dwarves-ad174d4-e1772190445583.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A group of dark wooden sculptures is arranged among tall pine trees in a sunlit forest. Most of the carved figures are seated or kneeling, some with helmets or rounded headgear, while one taller figure stands upright at the center. The sculptures are spaced evenly across the forest floor. In the background, there are a few simple buildings with wooden or metal siding, one marked with graffiti. Sunlight filters through the trees, casting long shadows across the ground." title="Sculptures depicting Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs can be found close to the park’s full-size Stalin statue. “The difference between folk tale and reality is not always scrupulously delineated here,” says Keith Lowe (Image by Keith Lowe)" /> The power of ridicule Had this statue, and all the others, been given to one of the other bidders for the monument park contract, perhaps there would have been less controversy. Europos Parkas, in Vilnius, wanted to exhibit the statues purely as works of art, alongside a whole variety of avant-garde creations by artists from all over the world. Here, perhaps, the aesthetic qualities of a Stalin statue might have been divorced from its political meaning. The Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights in Vilnius also applied for the contract. It would have displayed the monuments in its main hall and courtyard. Had Stalin’s statue been placed here, it would have been seen alongside an extensive exhibition dedicated to his crimes. Many of those who protested against Grūtas Park wanted the museum to have won the bid precisely because it would have put the benign looking statues of figures like Stalin in a much, much grimmer context. But there is something about the way that Grūtas Park displays its statues that is enormously refreshing. Seeing Stalin with a squirrel on his head takes away some of the nightmarish power he continues to exercise over us from beyond the grave. When birds are nesting in Lenin’s fingers, and children are climbing over the guns that were once aimed at Lithuanian partisans, these symbols of state power no longer seem as frightening as they once did. This seems to be exactly what Viliumas Malinauskas is trying to achieve. In an interview with the Guardian shortly before the park opened, the proprietor was unapologetic about his peculiar approach to Lithuania’s troubled history. “People can come here and joke about the sculptures,” he said. “And that will mean Lithuania is no longer afraid of Communism.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/9P1020459-2-Playground-with-military-van-2d8059e-e1772190762404.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A colorful playground structure sits in a sandy, wooded clearing. It includes a red‑and‑green climbing frame, a curved yellow slide, and a green cylindrical tunnel element. Tall pine trees surround the area, casting dappled light on the ground. In the background, partly hidden by trees and bushes, an old green vehicle—possibly a van or small truck—rests near the edge of the clearing." title="A children’s climbing frame is sited metres away from a disused military vehicle. Does such a juxtaposition make Lithuania’s troubled past seem less frightening? (Image by Keith Lowe)" /> Grūtas Park is a bizarre mix of playground, zoo and atrocity museum. It trivialises the past in the most appalling ways, especially with its Disneyfied guard towers and barbed wire. Some of the museum displays in its barrack-style huts are more nostalgic than critical of the regime. And its commercial exploitation of Lithuania’s painful past is questionable to say the least: I managed to buy myself a Stalin mug and a Stalin keyring in the gift shop on my way out. In fact, there are so many things about Grūtas Park that could be considered offensive that I hardly know where to start; and yet somehow, through its sheer banality, it comes closer to freeing Lithuania from its history than any of the more serious and thoughtful monuments that have been so carefully produced in other parts of Europe. The magic ingredient is ridicule. I’m not sure how much this ridicule was ever intended by the park’s founder and owner, and how much is just a function of a ridiculous set-up. Nevertheless, it is there, and it is a powerful antidote to the atmosphere of fear that plagued this country for so many years. Keith Lowe is an author and former military history publisher who has spent more than 20 years writing about the Second World War and its aftermath. His most recent book is Naples 1944: War, Liberation and Chaos (William Collins, 2024)