The Forum

What’s in a shoe - apart from a foot? Shoes can be so much more than a protection and ‘dressing’ of our feet: from Egyptian pharaohs to European paupers, footwear has been linked not just with the wearer’s social and economic standing but also cultural identity, personality and even moral values. Rajan Datar follows the history of footwear with the help of Elizabeth Semmelhack, Senior Curator of t...

The 18th Century Spanish artist Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes has been called the “most radical artist that ever lived”. He was not afraid to shock with his depictions of the darkest sides of human nature, and his work still shocks us today. Goya rose from humble beginnings to become the official court painter to the kings of Spain. But while he created dazzling portraits of royals and aristo...

The play Antigone by the Greek playwright Sophocles was written almost 2,500 years ago, but to this day it is believed to be the most performed play- anywhere in the world. It tells the story of Antigone, a girl who ends up challenging the power of the ruler of Thebes, in a devastating battle of wills that pits family duty against the law of the state. So why does this story of civil disobedience...

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, which tells the fantastical story of a visit of the devil to the Soviet Union, is considered to be one of the most successful Russian novels of the 20th Century. Written in secret in the 1930s when Stalinist repression of the arts was at its height, the novel was only published more than 25 years later, when its blend of biting satire and magic realism...

Whether it’s kimchi, kombucha, kefir or kraut, fermented foods are today all the rage. And yet people have been fermenting food and beverages for thousands of years – to preserve food stuffs, to break down toxins, to mark rituals and to enhance flavour. Without knowledge of the science, local communities practised fermentation instinctively, through trial and error and by careful observation. In t...

100 years ago, Turkish defeat in World War One signalled the end of the once great Ottoman Empire. What emerged was a European orientated secular republic led by a man who used social engineering to shape Turkey in his own image – Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Bridget Kendall examines this key period of Turkish history and asks whether modernisation could have been brought in less forcefully, and why the...

The Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a towering literary figure whose novels, chronicles and essays have lifted the lid on the horrors of the Soviet gulag network, which over several decades incarcerated millions of often innocent prisoners. Born a hundred years ago, Solzhenitsyn survived the brutal conditions of a gulag in Kazakhstan and it was this harrowing experience that provided the...

In 1953 Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq was overthrown in a coup. It was billed as a popular uprising in support of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, yet behind the scenes were the British and American intelligence services. Mossadeq had swept to power only two years earlier promising to nationalise Iran’s vast oil reserves, but this, along with an apparent Communist threa...

The Russian dance impresario Sergei Diaghilev transformed not only ballet, but all the arts in the 20th century. His ground-breaking Ballets Russes burst onto the scene in Paris in 1909 and replaced stuffy set pieces with shockingly vibrant performances that brought together scenery by artists Picasso and Matisse, costumes by Coco Chanel, avant-garde music by Stravinsky and Prokofiev, and a new st...

For many people, Charlie Chaplin and the Tramp, a character he created at the start of his film career, are synonymous. This funny little man with a black moustache and a waddling gait, dressed in baggy trousers and a tight jacket, with oversized shoes and a small bowler hat, made millions of people laugh, turned Chaplin into a household name and - in his day - the highest paid entertainer in the...

Coal is a commodity that’s often been considered dirty, old fashioned and cheap, a humble black stone that evokes images of soot covered workers. And yet this lump of energy became the essential fuel for industrialisation all over the world, transforming societies and launching empires. But this transformative power came at a cost, as well as bringing unprecedented wealth it also brought unprecede...

Toilets come in many shapes and sizes around the world: squat and throne, dry and flush, indoor and outdoor. Most of us use one every day, but over two billion people still do not have access to facilities, leading to health and sanitary problems and even risks for personal security. From the 50 seater public toilets of ancient Rome and the modern flush toilet, invented by a godson of a 16th centu...

Stoicism is a school of thought over two thousand years old that asked how to live "a good life" in an unpredictable world, and how to make the best of what is in our power, while accepting the rest as it happens naturally. It trumpeted the value of reason as man's most valuable Virtue, and offered a practical guide to remaining steadfast, strong and in control. This ancient Graeco-Roman philosoph...

Around the twelfth and thirteenth century CE Angkor was thought to be one of the world's biggest cities. Its massive temple complex at Angkor Wat covered hundreds of acres adorned with majestic towers, terraces and waterways: symbols of the might of the Khmer kings who ruled the region. Angkor Wat attracts millions of tourists every year and has pride of place on the Cambodian national flag but th...

The myths that have grown up around Cleopatra since her eventful reign in the first century BCE are so vivid and alluring that they seem to have taken on a life of their own. The Egyptian queen has been portrayed in art and literature as a wily temptress whose devastating beauty seduced two of Rome’s most powerful men, or as a ruthless killer who murdered her own relatives to get ahead, or as a tr...

The Austrian satirical writer Karl Kraus used his forensic pen to expose the Hapsburg Empire and 20th century Vienna for its dishonesty and decay. He was the master of the punchy one liner, as well as being extremely prolific: his magazine Die Fackel ran to 922 editions, that's some 22 thousand pages, and Kraus wrote most of them. He was also full of contradictions: he could be both progressive an...

We probably know ‘cool’ when we see it, but what lies behind it and where did it originate? Most scholars agree that cool is a mode of being, an attitude or aesthetic. Some argue it arose out of a West African mode of performance, and was later developed in jazz circles by African-American musicians. Cool served to hide one’s emotions and survive confrontation with any hostile external forces – na...

Frida Kahlo, the iconic and flamboyant Mexican painter, is one of the most famous female artists of our age. Her rebellious and subversive works are instantly recognisable. Many are self-portraits depicting an arresting dark and heavy-browed woman, often in bright traditional Mexican dress with flowers woven into her hair, staring straight out of the canvas. In her life time, she was better known...

Quentin Cooper and guests follow the twists and turns of jet engine development: from its 1930s origins and the often highly dangerous early fighters in World War 2, through Korea, Vietnam and the Cold War, to the much more reliable modern incarnations which now take us all over the world. Just three decades after the first airplane took off, the emerging aero industry was already stalling. There...

Edgar Allan Poe is a 19th century American writer whose spine-chilling gothic tales have inspired generations of horror and mystery fiction writers. His poem ‘The Raven’, and short stories such as ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ and ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ brought him international fame, and he is also thought to have invented the detective fiction genre with ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’. B...

In the mid-19th century Japan transformed itself from feudal state to economic powerhouse at breakneck speed. Taking their cue from Western imperial powers, the rebel samurai who seized power in 1868 implemented an astonishing programme of reform. By removing an entire ruling elite, introducing national conscription and compulsory education, the Meiji rulers set about building a brand new society....

Born in 1924, the prolific writer and thinker James Baldwin is a landmark figure in twentieth century American culture. The author of popular novels such as Go Tell It on the Mountain and bold essay collections such as The Fire Next Time, his works explored themes including race, sexuality, identity, democracy and love. An African-American man born in Harlem who spent much of his life in France, h...

The Acropolis of Athens, with its crowning glory the Parthenon and its massive marble pillars, is one of the most recognisable sites in the world. In the 5th and 6th century BCE, it was where the concept of democracy – rule by the people – first developed, where modern- day theatre was born, and it gave the West the foundation of its politics, philosophy and history. But the Acropolis is also, lik...

A champagne-loving industrialist who enjoyed hunting, a literary critic and an upstanding Victorian gentleman: this does not sound like a description of your typical advocate of proletarian revolution or the co-author of the Communist Manifesto. Yet Friedrich Engels was all those things and more. Deliberately keeping in the shadows of his comrade-in-arms Karl Marx, Engels led an eventful life, fig...

Empress Nur Jahan was the most powerful woman in 17th century India, wielding an unparalleled control over the Mughal Empire. Born as Mehr-un-Nissa, she came from a wealthy Iranian family who came to India and made their way up the imperial court. After the death of her first husband, a Persian soldier, she became the twentieth and final wife of Mughal Emperor Jahangir and her rise to the top real...