The Forum

It takes twelve honey bees their entire lifetimes to make one spoonful of honey. From sweetening and preserving food, to treating wounds and sore throats, this sweet, viscous substance has played an important role in nearly every society around the world. In the ancient world, it held religious significance while in the 21st century, scientists are researching how honey could combat lethal disease...

The name Highlife is thought to have been coined in the early 20th Century when people on the streets outside clubs reserved for the Gold Coast elite observed the elegant clothes and dancing of the customers inside. Dance band Highlife is just one element of the music which has soaked up all manner of cultural traffic that has marked this part of West Africa. Military bands, gospel, calypso, folk...

At its height, Yiddish, the language of the European Jews, was spoken by more than ten million people, from Russia in the east to the Netherlands in the West. But by the mid -20th century, these numbers were severely depleted following the Holocaust, and then the creation of the modern-day state of Israel where the speaking of Yiddish was discouraged. So what does the future hold for this endanger...

The practice of having your food prepared by strangers in a public place goes back millennia but what makes a restaurant different from the many other dining options is that you can choose from a list of dishes, you can eat at a time of your rather than the cook’s choosing and are usually served by a professional waiter in pleasant surroundings. There were fully-fledged restaurants in 12th-century...

A First Lady who broke the mould: Eleanor Roosevelt was not just a hostess at her husband’s side, but a spokeswoman for the disadvantaged, a journalist, and an early civil rights campaigner, who placed herself at the heart of American politics, acting as a prominent adviser and representative for her husband, Franklin Roosevelt, the longest-serving president of the United States. But she was also...

There were many sides to Ibn Khaldun - a top scholar, a scheming political mastermind, a peripatetic political guru to many a dynasty in North Africa, an inventor of a social science or two. He also spent a month talking to one of the world’s most dangerous conquerors and was imprisoned several times. At a time when the Black Death was raging through the area he suffered terrible personal tragedie...

Although the name conjures up the image of a swashbuckling poet with an enormous nose, little is known about the life of the maverick 17th-century writer and philosopher Cyrano de Bergerac. Born four centuries ago, he left behind a play, love letters and a handful of strange travelogues that imagine a journey to the moon. The sketchy details of his past were a blank canvas for the late 19th-centur...

They were the ancient horse lords of the Eurasian steppe, nomadic warriors whose influence extended over thousands of kilometres from Mongolia to the Ukraine. The spectacular gold jewellery and mummified remains preserved in their ancient burial mounds, some the size of a football pitch, tell us they loved colour and precious metal. But what else do we know about the enigmatic Scythians? They left...

The Russian Civil war was a struggle for power at every level – from the villages to the imperial centre, with more than 11 foreign powers involved as well as nationalists, from Ukraine, Poland and the Baltic states, fighting for independence. This conflict, which took place a hundred years ago, between a small group of revolutionaries known as the Bolsheviks and their enemies was one of the most...

Mention famous polar explorers to most people and they will probably come up with the names Scott and Amundsen. But really there should be another name before these, Fridtjof Nansen, a man who can be viewed as a true pioneer of intrepid, indeed death-defying expeditions to the freezing, bleak extremities of the world. He ventured closer than anyone else before him towards the North Pole but this N...

From the moment the seven-year-old Rudolf Nureyev saw a ballet on stage in his local theatre, he lived and breathed dance. That overwhelming desire to be on stage carried him throughout his life – from his student days in Leningrad to his defection to the West in a blaze of publicity, from theatres around the world to his final curtain in 1992 when his gaunt body was ravaged by Aids. He made good...

John Harvey Kellogg is best known, along with his brother, for changing the way the world ate breakfast. But cornflakes were actually a by-product of Dr Kellogg’s lifelong mission to improve the dietary health of patients at his Battle Creek Sanitarium, a once world-famous medical centre and spa in the US state of Michigan that he ran from 1876 to 1943. Here Kellogg preached the art of ‘biologic l...

Indigo: not only one of the seven colours of the rainbow and the dye that makes your jeans look like they do but and a highly valued pigment which is naturally found in some plants and whose use can be traced back at least six thousand years to Peru. Such was the desirability of indigo that along with sugar, cotton, coffee and tobacco it became a major driver for globalised trade and the horrors o...

Domesticated cats are thought to have started living alongside humans more than 9000 years ago. Unlike dogs, it's believed cats domesticated themselves, entering the homes of early arable farmers in the Fertile Crescent to control the rodent population. Since then, they've been worshipped, vilified and revered by various societies around the world. Today, they are one of the world's most popular p...

Manuela Sáenz was an Ecuadorian revolutionary who for many years was most famous for her role as the lover of Simón Bolívar - the Venezuelan military leader who secured independence from Spain for a number of countries in South America between 1819-1830. Sáenz left her British husband for Bolívar, or 'The Liberator' as he was known, and famously saved the leader from an assassination attempt, earn...

The invention of the electric telegraph in the mid-19th century brought about a revolution in human communication that some argue rivals the printing press and the internet. Suddenly the ‘tyranny of distance’ could be overcome – messages that once might have taken days or even weeks to arrive could be sent almost instantly using Morse code signals. Soon wires reached across continents and under oc...

Made from the simple juice of the poppy, opium is arguably the oldest and most widely used drug in the world. Since prehistoric times it has been used to relieve physical pain and quieten troubled minds. It has enabled medical breakthroughs, and inspired some of the greatest Romantic poets and composers. But opium, and its later derivatives morphine and heroin, has also brought addiction and untol...

‘There is no sun without shadows, and it is essential to know the night,’ the words of Albert Camus, a writer whose exploration of the absurd nature of the human condition made him a literary and intellectual icon. Camus was born in Algeria but is celebrated in France as one of its great twentieth-century novelists and philosophers. His first publishing success, The Stranger, focused on the absurd...

Fernando Pessoa is Portugal’s national poet and a giant of 20th Century literature but he’s also a writer who multiplied himself, who wrote under dozens of alter egos, ranging from an engineer trained in Glasgow in Scotland, to a hunchback who is helplessly lovesick, to a doctor and Latin scholar who’s a fervent Royalist. His masterpiece The Book of Disquiet, considered to be one of the defining w...

Albert Einstein’s inability to get a job on graduating has given hope to generations of students. Knowing what we know now about the genius scientist, it’s hard to avoid smiling on reading his father’s pleas to physics professors to give his son an academic post. Perhaps it was just as well that these attempts failed, as the job Einstein eventually secured gave him the opportunity to daydream. Ass...

Fans of Hollywood cinema may recognise the name Imhotep from the original The Mummy film from 1932, and its various remakes. In the movie, Imhotep (played by Boris Karloff) is an Ancient Egyptian high priest who was mummified alive because he had attempted to resurrect his forbidden lover. Fast forward several thousand years, and an archaeologist brings the mummy back to life, with dangerous conse...

"In the future everybody will be world-famous for fifteen minutes” is probably the best known quote attributed to Andy Warhol. Warhol was an American artist who became a superstar in the visual art movement known as Pop Art. He crossed the boundaries between art and celebrity becoming famous for what we now call branding, but the private Warhol was a deeply religious man and to his close relatives...

“I didn’t like my life, so I created my life,” the French fashion designer, Coco Chanel declared. And what a life it was: from her humble beginnings in an orphanage, Chanel blazed a trail as a fiercely independent woman, rising to become the toast of French high society. She mixed with the artists who defined modernism in the 1920s and ‘30s, and created a fashion empire which today is a multi-bill...

The vision of the future evoked in George Orwell’s last novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was so terrifying to its first readers that some claimed to be unable to sleep at night. When the book was adapted by the BBC for the new medium of television after Orwell’s death, millions became aware of the novel’s concepts and language which have since seeped into Western popular culture. Big Brother, Room 101,...

For over two and a half thousand years the Ancient Greek Spartans have been known for their military might, discipline and self-sacrifice. Recent popular culture has portrayed them as the ultimate fearless warriors, especially ‘the 300’ Spartans who fought to the death at Thermopylae. But where does this image come from, and what do we really know about Spartan society and the peculiar utopia it t...