Laurence Earle

The Roman Empire was at its height when Hadrian came to power in AD 117, its territory encircling the Mediterranean, and reaching from Britain in the north as far as Egypt in the south.

‘Through a series of spectacular experiments, the archaeologist Peter Reynolds… told us more about Iron Age buildings and agriculture than most of the excavations of that period put together,’ said The Guardian in its 2001 obituary of the first director of Butser Ancient Farm, the pioneering archaeological open-air museum nestling in the South Downs, which is now celebrating its 50th birthday.

On 11 October 1982, an estimated global audience of 60 million people tuned in to watch one of the televisual events of the decade: the long-awaited raising of the Mary Rose, Henry VIII’s ill-fated Tudor flagship, from the seabed near Portsmouth, where it had rested since capsizing while fighting against the French at the Battle of the Solent some 437 years previously.

Few figures in our culture have been so vilified as Lilith, the first wife of Adam – who, according to Jewish tradition, insolently refused to submit to her husband’s desires, preferring to leave the perfection of the Garden of Eden, and become the consort of Satan instead.

Throughout history, gold has captured the imagination – as a glittering symbol of money, sex, power, divine love, or whatever else our hearts desire. From the Greek myth of the Golden Fleece to Titian’s Danae, and from the golden objects found in Ancient Egyptian tombs to the quest at the heart of JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, the precious metal has been mined as subject matter for writers and artists across continents and down millennia.

While the subject of immigration remains perennially high up the modern political agenda, there is a tendency still in Britain to view the movement of people to these shores as a relatively recent phenomenon – as if it only began in the post-war period, with the arrival of the ‘Windrush generation’ and other migrants from countries that once were part of the British Empire. But multiculturalism has been a fact of life for much longer than that, of course.

The glorious, far-reaching south-western outlook from Richmond Hill has long been one of England’s most famous views. For centuries, painters (including Reynolds, Gainsborough, Constable and Turner) have climbed to the top in search of inspiration from the landscape, and to marvel at the beauty of the Thames as it wends its way serenely past the grand houses below.

These days, we take it for granted that we carry the world – and the cosmos – in our pockets. Powerful smart phones and ever-more-sophisticated technology mean that we can summon up highly detailed maps both of the earth and the heavens above with just a few taps of the screen. It was not always like this, of course.

It is a question that has been debated by archaeologists and historians for decades: to what extent can one of the worst disasters in human history, the catastrophic volcanic eruption in c.1600 BC that devastated the ancient Aegean island of Thera (now known as Santorini), be linked to the mysterious collapse of one of the first European cultures, the once-dominant Minoan civilisation centred on the nearby island of Crete?

The daring German capture of Crete in May-June 1941 is not often mentioned alongside more celebrated military upsets. But still, there were many levels on which Operation Merkur (Mercury) – as it was codenamed – was a victory against the odds.