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Clare Mulley
The MHM award-winning author, historian, and broadcaster on overlooked stories and person-sized doorways to the past.
Ian Knight
The winner of MHM’s 2025 Book of the Year award on redcoats, distant battlefields, and the film that started it all.
Brian M Fagan (1 August 1936-1 July 2025)
Professor Brian M Fagan, who has died aged 88, was a New York Times best-selling author and Current World Archaeology columnist, whose work brought the past to life for generations of readers. Nadia Durrani reflects.
David Olusoga
The historian and broadcaster on the weapons that changed the world, and why 1917 may be his favourite war film.
Iain MacGregor
The MHM award-winning author and publisher on meeting Hilary Mantel, and why Abraham Lincoln is his hero.
Phillips Payson O’Brien
The American-born writer and academic Phillips Payson O’Brien on an admirable dictator, and his fascination with failure.
Laurence Rees
The award-winning author and documentary film-maker on the Nazis, neuroscience, and why he doesn’t really like war movies.
Helen Fry
The historian and best-selling author on her obsession with espionage, and why she will always admire Edith Cavell.
James Holland
The best-selling historian on his obsession with World War II, and why he wouldn’t invite Monty to dinner.
Margaret Alice Murray (1863-1963)
These same people would not hesitate to wear a scarab-ring taken off a dead man’s hand… Their objections – their opinions even – are an offence to science.
Margaret Murray’s Pioneering Investigation in 1908
A scientific approach to the study of ancient Egyptian mummies.
Sylvanus Griswold Morley
In those days, Mesoamerican archaeology was not for the faint-hearted, and Sylvanus Griswold Morley – ‘physically frail, short of stature, squeaky-voiced and near-sighted’, according to Prudence Rice and Christopher Ward – wasn’t
Roman women: tracing female archaeologists of the Roman frontiers
David Breeze, Tatiana Ivleva, and Rebecca Jones consider the contribution made to the study of Roman frontiers by Brenda Heywood, who died last December, and other contemporary female archaeologists.
Honouring Honor Frost
‘As early as 1958, she took part in the first excavation of a 13th-century BC Bronze Age shipwreck.’
The Corbett Society
Harold James Dyos, late Professor of Urban History at the University of Leicester, wrote that London underwent three distinct periods of growth: an increasingly dense build-up of the population in the centre,
Hilda Petrie (1871-1956)
Having learnt Arabic, Hilda would hire and pay their workers. She slept in a hut at Tarkhan with 80 skulls by her bed, living off canned pilchards and bully beef.
John Wesley Gilbert (1863-1923)
Gilbert was one of the first Americans – of any ethnicity – to undertake archaeological work in Greece. There, he is likely to have met Heinrich Schliemann, rediscoverer of Troy, and certainly he did groundbreaking excavation work on the neighbourhoods of Athens
A century of Tutankhamun
What Carter and his Egyptian team found at the bottom of the stairs and along a short corridor stunned the world, of course – especially those countries barely beginning to recover from the dreadful losses of the First World War.
Halet Çambel
This ruined city had richly carved monumental gateways and, even more significant, an 8th-century BC stela that, bearing the same text in both the Phoenician alphabet and Luwian hieroglyphics, gave Çambel the key to unlock the Luwian language for future scholars.
Exploring myth and legend with Janina Ramirez
Historian Janina Ramirez tells Diana Bentley about her latest work delving into stories of celebrated archaeological discoveries and the people behind them, and of the medieval women all-too-often overlooked by history.
Johannes Østrup’s journey of discovery: exploring the value of centuries-old scientific records
Dig into archive records. Leaf through forgotten research in books that were written in foreign tongues. Centuries-old observations can provide important perspectives on the archaeological record, as Eva Mortensen and Rubina Raja highlight in this account of a pioneering Danish explorer in the Syrian Desert.