Matt Elton: You recently sent out an email newsletter in your capacity as Royal Historical Society [RHS] president, highlighting the issue of university history funding. What do you, and the RHS, see as being the problem?
Emma Griffin: My sense is that things are bad, and getting worse. My predecessors as RHS president would occasionally hear from a department being restructured or closed down. Now we get these emails every couple of months. It was also previously the case that a history department at risk of closure was typically a small department in an institution that didn't have a very long tradition of teaching history. But we're now hearing from much larger universities that have had a large and thriving history department for perhaps 60 years, and with 30 or 40 members of staff, that are suffering really serious recruitment and retention problems. So we do think there is a real problem, and we do think it's connected with larger decisions about how undergraduates are funded in the UK, which have particular implications for disciplines such as history.
Are figures available for these cuts?
There is no real way of knowing how many historians, history departments or history degrees are being cut. However, as far as we can tell, there hasn't been a very large drop in the total number of students. Instead, we're looking at the clustering of lots of students in a small number of institutions particularly the 'Russell Group', whose 24 members include the UK's largest, oldest universities. They are suddenly making the decision to admit many more students than in the recent past. This means that other institutions - even those with very healthy, viable history departments - can't recruit enough students. Almost all of the funding for history departments comes from student fees, so if you're not getting enough students, you have a really serious financial problem.
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The Long Road Back - The Election Was Tough for the Conservatives but the Past Holds Clues on How Parties Can Return From the Brink
It’s election night 1997, and Jeremy Paxman is grilling Tory grandee Cecil Parkinson. “You’re the chairman of a fertiliser firm,” the famously pugnacious broadcaster asked Parkinson. “How deep is the mess you’re in?” Twenty-seven years later, as the Conservative party comes to terms with another landslide defeat, it’s worth applying the same question to the present day. How does this result compare with previous devastating losses – not only those suffered by the Tories themselves, but also those experienced by the other major parties? And what can history teach us about the tools that politicians use to dig themselves out of the dung heap and set themselves back on the road to power?
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What a summer it’s been so far, with an astonishing election result. There has been much talk of national renewal, and in due course we’ll see what that means. But it felt like a watershed. The new prime minister’s dad was a toolmaker, his mum a nurse; the cabinet is majority comprehensive-educated, with more alumni of Parrs Wood High School than of Eton. Among commentators – not just on the left – there’s been a growing feeling that 14 years of Tory rule, compounded by Brexit, have undermined what the great medieval historian Ibn Khaldun called asabiyyah: group feeling – the glue that makes societies work. And watching TV on election night, I found myself wondering whether, like sediment settling in a glass, the time has finally arrived for a new national narrative
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According to ancient Roman natural philosopher Pliny the Elder, Apicius was “the most gluttonous gorger of all spendthrifts”. The cookbook attributed to him, known simply as Apicius or as De Re Coquinaria (On the Art of Cooking), is one of the oldest collections of recipes surviving from antiquity. Its author may have been Marcus Gavius Apicius, a Roman gourmet of the first century AD who reputedly travelled all the way from Campania to Libya on the hunt for the largest, juiciest prawns.
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Henry’s wary nature is typically attributed to his shaky claim to the throne. The first Tudor monarch was unable to escape the taunt that he was a usurper with no right to call himself king. In fact, his renowned paranoia was the inevitable consequence of a traumatic youth – a trait ingrained long before he harboured ambitions to wear a crown. If we delve deeper into Henry’s background, we can draw a fuller picture of one of our most circumspect of monarchs – one that might elicit sympathy for a long misunderstood king.
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ROGER MOORHOUSE is absorbed by a little-known but politically significant Polish princess whose life encompassed the major events of the later 18th and 19th centuries
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From Magna Carta to parliament, taxation to the law courts, the 13th and 14th centuries laid the foundations for the modern British state
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Æthelstan is one of the greatest of all Anglo-Saxon monarchs. So why, asks Michael Wood, does the first king of the English remain so fiendishly elusive?
