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Opening Gambit
Paving the way for women in chess
The Chess Game, Sofonisba Anguissola (1555 – National Museum Poznań) By Lauren Hepburn The Queen’s Gambit, the Netflix series about a troubled chess prodigy named Beth Harman, first aired in...
Rebecah Child: a manuscript ‘receipt’ book
By Lauren Hepburn Rebecah Child, the Marchioness of Worcester, was not alone in personally collecting an extensive range of recipes for her household. Manuscript ‘receipt’ (recipe) books such as...
5 Rare Books about Love, from Peter Harrington’s “Love in Literature” Catalogue
Rare book shop Peter Harrington has recovered, restored and found loving homes for many romantic treasures. Each catalogue is painstakingly curated by a team of Peter Harrington rare book dealers,...
Adam Smith – The Morality of Nations and the Making of America
Tom Elliott introduces the first edition of Smith's magnum opus, The Wealth of Nations. Before Adam Smith was the father of economics, he was known in the 18th century as the author of a...
Democratic Depravity: Curt Moreck’s Berlin
By Andy Stewart MacKay After the horrors of the Great War, “All values were changed” wrote the novelist Stefan Zweig of 1920s Berlin; the city “transformed into the Babylon of the world”. It wasn’t...
A plague on all your books: Great works written in isolation
By Adam Douglas, senior specialist at Peter Harrington Many writers need isolation to get their creative juices flowing. Virginia Woolf reckoned that women writers of her generation simply needed a...
“Who is Sylvia, what is she, That all our scribes commend her?” Sylvia Beach and Shakespeare and Company
This International Women’s Day, Peter Harrington celebrates Sylvia Beach, the trailblazing bookseller and publisher who helped shape the literary landscape of her age. A century ago, she opened a...
Contraception and Control: Two early advocates for reproductive rights
Annie Besant and Marie Stopes By Thea Hawlin In 1877 a woman stood up in a courtroom and became the first female to publicly endorse the use of birth control in the United Kingdom. The...
Anne le Fèvre Dacier: Homer’s first female translator
Penelope and her Suitors (1912) by John William Waterhouse The last ten years have brought particular focus to women’s engagement with the Classics. 2017 saw Emily Wilson publish her...
Cometh the hour, cometh the man: the works of Winston Churchill
It is possible that Winston Churchill is as popular a figure today as he was at the height of his fame as the heroic leader of Britain during the Second World War. The recent film, The Darkest Hour...
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