Analysis from all corners - BlogFlock

Love affairs, screaming fans and tragic deaths: inside the lives of history’s biggest heartthrobs - HistoryExtra

2026-06-14T14:30:21.000Z

Celebrity crush culture didn’t begin with modern boy bands; it emerged wherever people could see, gossip about, and project desire onto public figures.

From handsome but chaotic Athenian generals and scandal-prone poets to 19th-century ‘rock stars’ and silver-screen rebels, the idea of the male heartthrob has deep historical roots.

Hilary Mitchell explores how fame, beauty, and charisma have combined across centuries to create enduring male sex symbols, and why we keep falling for them.

1. Beau Brummell (1778–1840)

When you think of Regency men, you probably imagine someone who looks very much like Beau Brummell. He’s perhaps the prime example of the Regency dandy: men known for their focus on fashion and looks, and their penchant for high-collared, smart tailoring: a move away from the artificial, powdered-wig-wearing pomp of the earlier 1700s.

Brummell was a British socialite who wasn’t famous for his wealth – he ended up gambling away much of his £30,000 inheritance from his grandfather – but rather for his charisma, looks, wit and desirability. He became a close friend of Prince George (the future George IV), which catapulted him into the highest levels of society.

He was legendary for his daily grooming routine, which could take hours. His outfits were discussed, dissected, and copied – he was, in essence, an early fashion influencer.

Unfortunately, after falling out with the prince, his influence collapsed and he died in poverty in France, but his legend lived on.

2. Charles Stewart Parnell (1846–91)

Charles Stewart Parnell was an Irish political leader who became an unexpected Victorian celebrity crush. He was the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party and the central figure in the late 19th century Irish Home Rule movement.

“The Uncrowned King of Ireland”, as he was known, was a symbol of Irish political aspiration and resistance to British rule. Parnell came from Anglo-Irish aristocracy, was educated at Cambridge, and moved easily in elite circles, but instead of devoting his life to idle pleasures, he chose to become a radical nationalist figure.

Radical nationalism might not sound very sexy, but contemporary descriptions consistently note that women openly adored the tall, dark and handsome politician. They reportedly fainted at his speeches, and he regularly received love letters and gifts from admirers. His political career ended in scandal when his long affair with Katharine O’Shea, a married woman, came to light.

3. Franz Liszt (1811–86)

You’ve no doubt heard of Beatlemania, but what about ‘Lisztomania’? Centuries before George, Paul, John and Ringo were the focus of public obsession, Hungarian-born composer and pianist Franz Liszt sent crowds wild with his revolutionary musical performances.

Liszt was a musical prodigy who began touring Europe as a child and, and by the 1840s, he was packing out concert halls across Europe, not just with music lovers but with fans desperate to see him: Liszt was good-looking, tall, slim, with strong features and long hair. The contemporary German poet Heinrich Heine coined the term ‘Lisztomania’ to describe the hysteria surrounding his performances. Some accounts describe women screaming and fainting in the audience, fighting over his gloves and handkerchiefs, collecting broken piano strings, and even saving cigar butts and coffee dregs he had touched.

He made the most of his popularity, too: his love life was public and widely discussed. His relationships with aristocratic women, especially Countess Marie d’Agoult, fed his reputation as a passionate, glamorous and seductive figure. He was, essentially, a 19th-century rock star, complete with screaming fans and high-profile lovers.

Read more | How history changed music: 8 moments that shaped the soundtrack of our world

4. Wallace Reid (1891–23)

The silent-movie era gave rise to several Hollywood heartthrobs, and Wallace Reid was one of the very first. He became one of Paramount’s biggest stars, sometimes billed as “the screen’s most perfect lover”, thanks to his all-American, boy-next-door appeal. He was blond, athletic, clean-cut – the sort of wholesome, approachable young man that women would be happy to introduce to their parents.

At his peak, he was among the highest-paid actors in the world and appeared in dozens of hugely popular films. He often played race-car drivers, athletes, and daring heroes, and fan magazines of the 1910s and early 1920s published his photographs constantly, framing him as kind, modest, and devoted. Women flocked to his films specifically to see him: a defining mark of a matinee idol.

After being injured in a train crash on the way to set, Reid was prescribed morphine, became dependent, and died at just 31, but he’d made a significant impact during his short life by helping to establish the “ideal leading man” formula Hollywood would follow for decades.

5. Francis X Bushman (1883–1966)

Like Wallace Reid, Francis X Bushman was one of the very first global screen heartthrobs, a silent film star whose fame in the 1910s was so intense that he was widely promoted as “the handsomest man in the world”.

Audiences might best remember him best as Messala in Ben-Hur (1925), but his heartthrob status was firmly established a decade earlier. He was marketed explicitly as beautiful, with the media repeatedly describing him as “perfectly formed”. He played romantic and heroic leads almost exclusively, which only added to his romantic appeal. His characters were noble, passionate, morally upright and emotionally intense.

Like Wallace Reid, he was the subject of near-constant magazine coverage and received truckloads of swooning letters from admirers. He paved the way for later hunky Hollywood sex symbols by proving that male beauty could be a primary selling point, rather than an added bonus.

6. Rudolph Valentino (1895–1926)

We’ve had Lisztomania, now it’s time for ‘Valentino hysteria’. Rudolph Valentino might have had a tragically short life, but his name is still a byword for movie heartthrobs.

Born Rodolfo Guglielmi in southern Italy, he emigrated to the US as a teenager, and rocketed to fame thanks to The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), where his sensual tango caused genuine moral panic, with newspapers condemning the scene as indecent. But it was The Sheik (also 1921) that sealed his status thanks to his billowing robes, smouldering looks, and a dangerously romantic persona that audiences, particularly women, went feral for.

His appeal wasn’t just about his good looks; he represented something different from the stiff, square-jawed, Wallace Reid-style masculinity Hollywood usually sold. As an Italian playing Arab and Latin characters, he embodied a kind of “dangerous foreignness” that felt thrilling to American audiences.

When he died aged just 31 of peritonitis following a ruptured stomach ulcer, the reaction was extraordinary. Thousands of fans fainted, rioted and queued for hours to view his body. Newspapers coined the phrase ‘Valentino hysteria’ to describe the mass grief: arguably the first global celebrity meltdown.

Read more | Marilyn Monroe at 100: why the blonde bombshell was so much more than a sex symbol

7. James Dean (1931–55)

No list of historical heartthrobs would be complete without James Dean, the ultimate mid-century celebrity crush. He was a brooding symbol of youthful rebellion whose entire legend was sealed in just a few years. He trained as an actor at the University of California in Los Angeles and was deeply influenced by Method acting; his work was packed with raw emotion, interior turmoil and intensity.

Given his impact and legacy, it is hard to believe that he starred in only three major films, all released between 1955 and 1956: East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause and Giant – that’s all, but his talent and sheer presence still live on. He felt things on screen in a way that felt uncomfortably real. He cried, raged and let it all out, in an era where men were supposed to be solid, reliable, unemotional breadwinners.

His early death, aged just 24, cemented his heartthrob status. He never aged, never disappointed his fans, and never made a bad late-career film.

8. Lord Byron (1788–1824)

Lord Byron was, perhaps, the original celebrity ‘bad boy’: a poet so famous, scandalous and desirable that his antics wouldn’t look out of place in a modern gossip column. It all began when he published the first instalments of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in 1812 and became instantly, absurdly well-known.

As he put it, he “woke up one morning and found [himself] famous.” He lived wildly and messily as an aristocrat, poet, traveller, political radical and scandal magnet. He was strikingly handsome, with “melancholy” good looks, and wrote openly about despair, longing, guilt and passion in a way that made emotional extremity sexy.

His reputation was outrageous even by modern standards, thanks to his affairs with married women and rumours of incest and bisexuality (though the latter was known only in elite circles), but that didn’t stop the hordes of swooning admirers.

Women collected locks of his hair, followed him in public, and wrote him letters. He died of a fever at 36 in the midst of fighting for Greek independence, a suitably dramatic ending to a life lived in the fast lane.

9. Giacomo Casanova (1725–98)

Casanova was such a famous lover that we still use his name as shorthand to describe irresistibly charming men today. Born in Venice, Casanova lived about a dozen lives in one: scholar, violinist, soldier, spy, gambler, occult enthusiast, diplomat and, slightly less excitingly, a librarian.

He moved through Europe’s elite circles with astonishing ease, befriending royalty, philosophers and cardinals, and then usually sleeping with someone nearby. His memoir, History of My Life, describes his love affairs in astonishing detail, but what really stands out is how attentive he was: he describes how he wooed his conquests with conversation, wit and curiosity, tailoring himself to each person he desired and, unlike many men of his era, Casanova seemed to care about women’s pleasure and consent.

He portrays himself as charming rather than predatory, and, if his memoir is to be believed, he often fell genuinely in love and wrote about women as individuals, not trophies. He shaped the modern idea of the lover as a confidante as much as a pursuer. He’s a heartthrob not because he was some kind of unattainable, dashing leading man, but because he made women feel seen, desired and heard.

Read more | 14 weird contraception methods from history: from weasel testicles to fish bladder condoms

10. Alcibiades (c450–404 BC)

If you’ve never heard the phrase ‘disaster bisexual’ before, buckle up, as you’re about to learn what it means. Alcibiades was ancient Athens’ most dazzling and chaotic hot mess. He was a politician, general and socialite whose beauty and charisma were so notorious that even his enemies couldn’t stop talking about it.

He was a student and associate of Socrates, and Plato repeatedly wrote about Alcibiades’ beauty and moral volatility. Despite generally behaving like a bit of a booze-addled, hedonistic wild child, Alcibiades attracted men and women alike. Plato’s Symposium immortalises Alcibiades as the gorgeous, drunken arrival who publicly declares his desire for Socrates, one of history’s most iconic messy entrances.

However, he shouldn’t really have been allowed anywhere near politics, as Alcibiades was, to put it mildly, a catastrophe. During the Peloponnesian War he switched allegiances multiple times. First loyal to Athens, then allied with Sparta, then Persia, then back to Athens. He was eventually assassinated in exile.

11. Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley (1545–67)

Though handsome, Lord Darnley has made it onto this list more as a cautionary tale, rather than an attempt to celebrate him as a heartthrob in a traditional sense. The king consort of Mary, Queen of Scots was undeniably handsome, but he was also a terrible person.

Contemporaries, such as English ambassador Thomas Randolph, were extremely clear: Darnley was beautiful. Tall (very tall for the time), well-built, fair-haired, with princely good looks. He was only 19 when he married Mary, who found him handsome, talented and charming… at first.

However, after they tied the knot, Darnley’s true character was revealed. He was arrogant, petulant and politically incompetent. His involvement in the brutal murder of Mary’s secretary, David Rizzio, destroyed his reputation.

His looks and lineage propelled him to power, but his lack of character helped trigger one of the most famous royal scandals in British history, and arguably Mary’s downfall. Yes, he looked like a Renaissance prince, and briefly embodied every romantic, dreamy ideal of kingship, but reality soon intervened.

So, remember – it’s not always a good idea to be taken in by a pretty face: true heartthrobs should have the personality to match.

The African Parrots - Charlie Angus / The Resistance

2026-06-14T11:31:17.000Z

In another life, I spent my time driving the roads of northern Ontario with a tape recorder and a notepad, interviewing hardrock miners and their families.

I was in my twenties, and deeply fascinated by the work, the culture and the distinct identity of mining culture. Somewhere along the way, I ran into a young photographer who was equally obsessed with the same subject.

Louie Palu and I became friends, partners and collaborators on three book projects.

Louie Palu and Charlie Angus at Dome Mine (South Porcupine) circa 1990

Louie went on to document the war in Kandahar and Donbas. He covered the narco wars and was in Washington on January 6th, documenting the events.

I went on to a career in politics.

We met so many incredible people in the years we spent travelling the northern mining towns. Here’s a piece I wrote about the late Pete Saille and his wife, Glenda.

There’s a little white house sitting along the twisting line of asphalt that runs along Highway 112 into the gold mining town of Kirkland Lake, Ontario [population 9,500].

On this stretch of the road, pretty much all the houses look alike and are barely noticed in a landscape of deep snow banks and evergreens.

Sitting at the dining room table, over a mug of instant and coffee mate, Glenda and Pete Saille are telling me about the African parrots. The birds are perched in the kitchen, watching me with disinterested disdain. I’m just another bio-ped mugging and quacking in front of them in the vain hope of eliciting a response.

It doesn’t work.

The dog knows better. He won’t go anywhere near the birds. And the cat... well, says Pete, every time the cat comes in the house, the birds start to chant, “Let’s kill the cat. Let’s kill the cat.”

If Glenda’s cooking spaghetti, one of the birds will fly over to the stove.

“Polly’s hungry,” the bird says.

“Too hot for Polly,” Glenda replies.

The bird responds, “Polly wants some now.”

“Polly will have to wait.’

“Oh ya?” says the bird. “Well, fuck you bitch.”

Glenda breaks into laughter like she does every time they tell the story. It’s too much to believe. But Glenda’s not a bullshitter. Neither is her husband, Pete. They don’t really care whether you believe the stories. What’s true is what happened.

The birds belong to their boarder, Wilson “Newfie” Lambert. He spends his week working out of town at the Kidd Creek [base metal] Mine, coming home on the weekend for a comfort meal from Glenda and a bullshit trading session with his old buddy Pete.

Newfie has been mining for years, but other than the parrots and a pickup truck, he doesn’t have much to show for the years.

“When the timber crew shouts down the hole at the mine, ‘Timber going down,’ Pete explains, “Newfie shouts back, ‘Alimony going up.’”

“He lost the house and everything to his wife,” Glenda explains. “But he don’t care. He says he can’t fit a house into a packsack.”

The term “pack sack miner” dates back to the days of the 19th-century mining rushes in the Coeur d’Alenes and Montana. It was a term given to the highly skilled and independent miners who travelled from mine to mine, never putting down roots.

In the modern world, the hired gun “contract” miner is the descendant of the old-style packsack miner. The contract crews are sent in to open up new zones in established mines or to build the underground infrastructure of new mineral deposits.

Pete Saille spent a number of years as a hired gun on international mining developments – the work took him around the world.

“We lived like goddamned kings overseas,” he says. “We were making $7500 a month [in the 70s and 80s]. We’d come home and buy a new car and have only two months to drive it before being shipped out again.”

Besides the international jobs, Pete worked on numerous Canadian mining projects. He took down Creighton No. 9 with the legendary Irish contractor Paddy Harrison and was shaft leader on the sinking of Macassa No. 3 in Kirkland Lake.

Pete Saille (centre), who passed away in 2016

At the time [1883-85], the sinking of the 7500 foot Macassa No. 3 shaft was the deepest mine shaft in the western hemisphere. Any veteran from that job is quick to throw out the stats of footage blasted, tons hauled, and cement poured – just to prove the point that this was an engineering marvel.

Glenda, however, is ready with her own set of stats.

“There were 283 men who worked during the sinking of that shaft. By the time the job was done, over 180 had separated from their wives.”

Why?

She just laughs slyly. “You know how they are… they’re hardrock miners.”

She doesn’t feel the need to connect the dots of the notoriety of the shaft sinkers for wild living. The work is dangerous. The pay is good. Men are a long way from home. Instead, Glenda produces another of the stats - there were only seven guys who managed to stay on the job from the beginning of the contract until it was completed.

“They told the men to expect two fatalities on a shaft of this scale,” she says.

Dave Whiddifield was the first fatality. He was squeezed to death when he got caught on the cross head of the number two ore bucket and was dragged up into the shaft timbers.

Pete nearly became fatality number two. He was hit in a rock burst (exploding rock from ground pressure) when the crew was blasting out the benches on the 7225 level. He was buried alive in a blast that brought the shaft walls down on him.

The blast happened on the very first day his teenage son [Pete Jr.] joined the crew to go underground.

“My son had only been underground for two hours when the blast hit me. He never wanted to go back underground after that. But I made him go back. He didn’t want to.”

Why would a parent send their son back underground into the dangerous world of shaft sinking?

“You gotta go back,” Glenda says. “What else are you going to do? It’s like falling off a horse.”

After a year in rehabilitation, Pete Sr. went back as a shaft contractor. “I went back with a gold plaque from the company and a lot of steel bolted in my damned leg.”

Life went on for Pete and Glenda.

In the late 1990s, a 2,500 shaft was begun on the highly touted Victoria Creek gold deposit in Northeastern Ontario [the shaft was sunk but the gold wasn’t there]. Pete was a natural as a leader on the job.

Part of his duties included regular inspections of the shaft and surface headframe [the tower above the shaft]. He rode the crew bucket up into the headframe and would step out onto the timbers to examine their condition.

During one inspection, Pete stepped out of the bucket and signalled to the hoist man to halt all other traffic while he inspected the timbers. But the message wasn’t received. A passing ore bucket hit Pete and crushed his pelvis. The crew found him hanging onto the mine timber 80 feet off the ground.

Glenda remembers the accident like it was yesterday.

“I was on my way to the bingo with a girlfriend. Her husband had already been injured in the mines. When we got to the bingo parlour in downtown Kirkland Lake, Todd Moore was waiting out front for me. He said that Pete had been injured. He told me not to worry that it was just his legs.”

Glenda outraced the ambulance to the local hospital. When she saw them bring him in, she cried out, “It’s not just his legs. He’ll never walk again.”

The doctors agreed. Pete was going to spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair. Pete spent months lying in bed looking at his seemingly dead legs. And then one day it happened. He saw his toe move.

Over the next year, Pete slowly but methodically learned to walk again. He never went back to work. Most of his time now is spent puttering around the house doing little projects.

“I have good days, and I have bad days,” he says, shrugging off the pain in his hips.

Pete still loves to talk mining. He wants to know what I’ve seen of the big expansion going on at the Kidd Deep mine project in Timmins, Ontario.“They’re taking the shaft below 10,000 feet,” he says wistfully.

It’s clear he still longs to be back in the heart of the action.

“Sure, I miss it when I get together with the boys,” he then pauses and pats his damaged pelvis. “But all those young bucks... I couldn’t compete against them anymore.”

“Ah, hon,” says Glenda affectionately. “You could dance circles around them.”

She then nudges Pete to take me out to the garage and show me his favourite toy – a hot rod, black sports car.

The car is kept carefully protected from the long, hard winters. Come summer, Pete will take it for a spin along the highway into town. A sports car and African parrots – leftover booty from the days when he was a king of underground.

Louie Palu will presenting a public lecture and discussion at the Cobalt Mining Museum on Tuesday, June 23rd at 6 pm.

Tickets are by donation.

If any photos or images on this site are under copyright, please let us know and we will provide appropriate credit. This content is used in accordance with applicable copyright laws, including “fair dealing” under Canadian law and “fair use” under Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act, for purposes such as criticism, comment, and news reporting.

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This sex poem sparked outrage in 1970s Britain – but who triumphed in the courtroom? - HistoryExtra

2026-06-12T16:30:08.000Z

Though debates relating to sexuality, gender identity and the limits of tolerance continue to rage, contemporary Britain seems a broadly accepting place. In historical terms, LGBTQ people are legally safer and freer in the UK than ever before. For most of the period from 1533, when the first civil sodomy law was passed, until the second half of the 20th century, same-sex acts between men were illegal in England. The last men executed for sodomy were hanged in 1835. And even in the mid-1950s, more than 1,000 were being imprisoned for homosexual acts each year.

By the 1970s, homosexuality was gradually becoming accepted within British society. The tide seemed to be turning with the 1957 Wolfenden Report (officially entitled the Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution), paving the way for the legalisation of homosexuality in 1967.

That landmark moment was far from the end of the fight for equality, however. And this year marks the 50th anniversary of a court case that severely challenged society’s acceptance of homosexuality – as well as testing legal definitions of blasphemy.

On 3 June 1976, Gay News published a poem by James Kirkup entitled The Love That Dares to Speak Its Name (a nod to “the love that dare not speak its name”, a line in the poem Two Loves written in 1892 by Lord Alfred Douglas, a lover of Oscar Wilde). This fortnightly newspaper, edited by Denis Lemon, had been founded four years earlier as a collaboration between former members of the Gay Liberation Front and members of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality to campaign for gay rights. It also explored gay culture of the past as well as more contemporary art, hence the decision to publish Kirkup’s poem.

Written in the voice of the centurion present at Christ’s crucifixion, the poem portrays a promiscuous Jesus who had sexual relations with John the Baptist, his disciples and other men including Pontius Pilate. It culminates with a quite graphic description of the centurion performing sex acts with Jesus’s broken body after it was taken down from the cross. The verse was illustrated by a picture of the crucified Christ, his genitalia clearly evident. It’s worth noting that Kirkup was by then an established and respected poet, travel writer, novelist and playwright, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature since 1962 – not just a provocateur. Yet even today his verse still has the power to shock.

Read more | Aids: the epidemic that changed Britain

Cross the line

But what was Kirkup’s intention and that of those who published his poem? Did they aim to create offence or to suggest the possibility of Christ’s offer of salvation to all people? Was the poem a niche item for a niche audience? There is no doubt that it was a serious piece of work. It did not make light of Christianity, nor did it scoff at religious ideas or doctrines, nor undermine the beliefs of others. This issue of intention proved crucial to the progress and outcome of the ensuing court case.

Soon after the poem’s publication, Mary Whitehouse – for more than two decades, Britain’s leading campaigner against what she saw as Britain’s moral decline – became aware of the verse. For many years it was believed that the relevant copy of Gay News had been sent to her by “a concerned probation officer”. Later anecdotal evidence suggests that it may have been posted to her by an atheist seeking to provoke her.

Whitehouse was a logical choice of recipient. A social conservative and founder of the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, she had long led campaigns against what she saw as the creeping tide of permissiveness engulfing the media. Those who had attracted her attention included a Danish filmmaker, Jens Jørgen Thorsen, who tried unsuccessfully to enter Britain at a time when he was trying to get a film entitled The Sex Life of Christ into production. Even Doctor Who, “teatime brutality for tots”, attracted her ire. Whitehouse also spoke out against homosexuality, claiming to dislike it but not to have anything personal against gay people.

Seeing the poem as an affront both to her own Christian faith and that of others, Whitehouse wondered whether legal action could be taken. This sent lawyers scurrying to antique texts on blasphemy law, where they found the relevant 1697/98 statute had been repealed in 1967, but that the common law offence of blasphemous libel remained in place. Lawyers would also have learnt that the last person prosecuted for blasphemy was socialist campaigner John William Gott, who in 1921 had been sentenced to nine months of imprisonment with hard labour for publishing satirical attacks on Christianity.

Scrutinising the law also revealed that a key case in 1883, against George William Foote, found that criticising Christianity was not in itself illegal. Instead, the test of blasphemy was the manner in which this was done. If an individual felt threatened or reacted strongly, that would be the essence of a crime, indicating an intention to offend.

Lawyers eventually decided that Gay News had a case to answer, and Whitehouse launched a private prosecution for blasphemous libel. But what did the accusation of blasphemy mean exactly? Was the poem blasphemous because it was unscriptural? The events described were fictitious, invented many centuries after the gospels, and did not satirise the crucifixion nor the salvation that Christ appeared to promise.

Given wider societal mores of the time, it’s likely that the factor found offensive by some was the association of Christ with homosexuality. That conclusion seems supported by the defence’s eventual attempt to show that the poem’s sentiments were in keeping with the contemporary world’s imaginings of religion and sexuality.

Blasphemy through the ages

British blasphemy laws have been updated and contested many times over the past six centuries

1401: De Heretico Comburendo, an act of parliament intended to suppress heresy in England, is passed under Henry IV 1676: As judge in a blasphemy case, Sir Matthew Hale decides that religion is “part and parcel” of the law 1697: Student Thomas Aikenhead, who had called theology “nonsense” and denied the Trinity during debates, is executed in Edinburgh – the last individual hanged for the crime of blasphemy in Britain 1697/98: Modern blasphemy statute is enacted, making it an offence to deny the Holy Trinity, for example 1819: Richard Carlile is convicted of blasphemy and seditious libel after he published Thomas Paine’s (banned) The Age of Reason and eyewitness accounts of the Peterloo Massacre 1857: Thomas Pooley, likely suffering with mental illness, is prosecuted and imprisoned for blasphemy, having daubed profane and libellous words in places around his neighbourhood 1883: George William Foote is convicted of publishing blasphemy – including a comic-strip ‘Life of Christ’ – in his secular humanist journal The Freethinker

1921: Atheist and socialist John William Gott (pictured) becomes the last person imprisoned for blasphemy in Britain, having published satirical attacks on Christianity 1967: The 1697 blasphemy statute is repealed 1976–79: Denis Lemon and Gay News are tried for blasphemous libel 2008: All remaining blasphemy laws in England and Wales are abolished

Moral conflict

Whatever the nuances of different arguments, it seemed as if liberal, progressive Britain was facing off against conservative forces that wanted retrenchment and the protection of traditional morality. The case came to court around the same time as the silver jubilee, the summer when punk broke and the Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save the Queen’ was high in the charts.

John Mortimer, probably the leading radical lawyer of the day, led the defence. Mortimer had been defence counsel in the 1971 obscenity trial of the editors of counterculture magazine Oz, following its publication of a composite image of a highly sexualised Rupert Bear. He was also famous for his fictional creation Rumpole of the Bailey, a lugubrious defence barrister later played by Leo McKern in a long-running ITV series. Alongside Mortimer was a younger barrister, Geoffrey Robertson, subsequently a high-profile human rights lawyer, but who was then just making his mark on the legal profession.

The duo aimed to establish that Gay News was a legitimate and responsible publication whose output was genuinely in the public interest. They planned to bring in a range of expert and heavyweight witness testimony to prove this assertion, and to state that Gay News was a central part of modern culture.

The defence argued that Whitehouse and her team were defending a passing morality, now firmly out of step with the modern world. In essence, they framed the case as a belated rerun of the Lady Chatterley’s Lover obscenity trial of 1960, when the sexual acts described and swear words uttered in the text led the prosecutor to ask – to the amusement of suburban Britain – whether one’s wife or servant should be allowed to read DH Lawrence’s novel.

As in the Chatterley case, the Gay News defence team poured effort into establishing the credentials of both author and publication, hoping that the last vestiges of censorship would collapse. The moralists would, they hoped, appear silly and out of step with the ‘spirit of the age’. All Britons had earned the right to escape a stuffy, repressive past. With hindsight, it could be argued that painting the case as an act of attempted censorship was a mistake, as was liberal overconfidence in the sensible rationality of the contemporary British mind.

Evangelical Christian barrister John Smyth led the case for the prosecution and acted as a mouthpiece for the argument that permissive liberalism had gone too far. As a result, society was being damaged by immorality. If texts such as the Kirkup poem were shared with the populace, Britons would be led towards poor choices and moral danger. Ultimately, this would sweep away Christian, moral England and individuals might lose the possibility of salvation. Such ideas echoed previous complaints about the danger of blasphemy stretching back to the 1920s. These Anglocentric views rested on an argument that Christianity had preserved Britain from the turmoil and revolutions that had engulfed swathes of Europe in the preceding century.

The case saw these opposing viewpoints locking horns in what could be characterised as a struggle between the literary and the literal. The defence argued that free expression should be allowed to the artist, whose responsibility was to the imagination. The prosecution suggested the meaning of language and expressions was literal, and texts could thus be an unacceptable challenge to beliefs cherished by individuals and whole societies.

Unfair fight

In the event, the case as it played out in court proved to be far from a fair fight. From the outset, judge Alan King-Hamilton seemed visibly to favour the prosecution. When the trial commenced, he departed from the usual practice of allowing both defence and prosecution to address the jury. This enabled the prosecution case to be heard in one go, without the break or balance of counterargument.

When the defence was eventually allowed to speak, King-Hamilton’s judgment also severely damaged its argument. To prove the seriousness and acceptability of Gay News, the defence produced famous witnesses in the shape of widely respected journalist and broadcaster Bernard Levin and Margaret Drabble, a similarly renowned author. But both were allowed to speak only as character witnesses rather than to testify about the poem’s literary merit. He also refused leave to consider theological arguments that the figure of Christ could now be interpreted in different ways. Instead, he suggested that, because the jury had all sworn on the New Testament, they were unlikely to be sympathetic to such arguments.

In his summing up, King-Hamilton claimed the poem was simply blasphemous “on its face”. Such a judgment ignored all potential arguments about intention and audience, even going against previous precedents back to the 19th century. In essence, he suggested that, because the case had come to court, the jury should treat the matter such that the literal trumped the literary.

Read more | The Stonewall Riots: the flashpoint that launched the gay rights movement in the US

Denis Lemon and Gay News were found guilty of blasphemous libel. Gay News Ltd was fined £1,000, while Lemon was fined £500 and sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment (suspended). It had been touch and go, said the judge, whether he would send Lemon to jail. Gay News Ltd and Lemon were ordered to pay Mary Whitehouse’s legal costs of £7,763.

Gay News Ltd and Lemon appealed against this conviction and sentence. On 17 March 1978, the Court of Appeal quashed Lemon’s suspended prison sentence. However, it upheld the conviction on the basis that the law of blasphemy had been developed before mens rea (literally, a guilty mind – the idea that the mental state or intention of a defendant should be considered in assessing their guilt) became an essential element of most crimes. In other words, the fact that printing the poem wasn’t intended as a criminal act of blasphemous libel provided no defence.

Gay News readers voted by a majority of 20 to one in favour of appealing to the House of Lords. The law lords delivered their judgment on 21 February 1979. At issue was whether or not the offence of blasphemous libel required specific intent of committing such a blasphemy. By a majority of three to two, the lords concluded that intention was not required – proving publication was all the law had to do.

Wider consequences

This confirmation of the conviction struck many among the gay community as a massive setback. Moreover, the case had a passing but nonetheless chilling effect on campaigns to secure gay rights. While Gay News didn’t suffer financially because its legal costs were covered by a fighting fund, its staff seemed to suffer a crisis of confidence. Gay culture suffered, too. A season of Gay Cinema was cancelled by the National Film Theatre whose director, Brian Baxter, considered it prudent “in the present circumstances”.

Nevertheless, there were push-backs against the judgment, too. The Tom Robinson Band’s 1978 song ‘Glad to be Gay’ referenced the hypocrisy of the Gay News prosecution being pursued at a time when The Sun daily published photographs of topless girls on page 3, and Playboy was routinely stocked in newsagents.

Though the case was seen as a blow to the quest for recognition and equality for gay people, subsequent human rights legislation has harmonised the age of consent for gay and heterosexual acts. Similarly, despite setbacks along the way such as the controversial Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988 – which banned local authorities from “promoting” homosexuality – sexuality itself has become a protected category within the law, providing firm legal protection against discrimination and hate crimes. Many Christians have embraced the broadly defined Gay Christian movement, and worked hard to promote inclusiveness within churches. Meanwhile, those campaigning for trans rights have, despite recent controversies, won notable victories.

Read more | Are some LGBTQ histories being overlooked?

The prosecution and its arguments have fared less well in the intervening decades. In his autobiography, Alan King-Hamilton expressed regret about giving Denis Lemon a suspended sentence, leaving the impression that the conservative response to Gay News had been an overreaction.

A much darker shadow hangs over the prosecution case, particularly John Smyth’s insistence that the poem was vile and glorified “repulsive” homosexual sexual acts. Smyth himself was later unmasked as a decades-long serial emotional, physical and sexual abuser of adolescent boys at his evangelical camps to which victims were lured. That scandal, and the cover-up around it, rocked the Church of England, leading to the resignation of the archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, in late 2024.

While Mary Whitehouse would have been appalled to discover Smyth’s activities, her own star waned somewhat after the Gay News case, which was arguably her last major triumph. In truth, her style of moralism and crusading was already falling out of fashion. It’s telling that, as early as 1979, while some councils banned screenings, Monty Python’s Biblical satire Life of Brian was the UK’s fourth-highest grossing film. More generally, in the years since the Gay News case, campaigning against media deemed to have ‘gone too far’ has ceased to use the language of morality and corruption. Instead, it has reached for the more rational and accessible language of ‘safety’, aiming to minimise harm for the vulnerable. Despite the failure of Mortimer’s defence, the literary has, by and large, won out against the literal.

David Nash is senior research fellow in history at Jesus College, University of Oxford

This article was first published in the June 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine

What if the Soviets had beaten the Americans to the moon? An alternate space race history - HistoryExtra

2026-06-12T14:21:15.000Z

The year is 1969, and Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov has just become the first human to land on the moon. This moment marks a decisive victory for the Soviet Union and sparks a protracted space race that sees both the Soviets and the US reach farther into the farther reaches of the solar system.

That’s the premise of the Apple TV series For All Mankind, running since 2019: what if the Soviets had won the race to the moon? It explores that alternate history by imagining how Nasa and the US government might respond to falling behind in the Cold War space race. What it doesn’t depict is the Soviet perspective.

That changed on 29 May, when spin-off show Star City dropped on Apple TV. It tells the story of the Soviet space agency’s efforts to beat the US to the moon, offering a different take on the events leading up to the first season of For All Mankind.

The alternate history explored in both shows echoes a period in our timeline that was fraught with tension and espionage but also illuminated by some of the greatest feats ever accomplished by humanity. They depict one possible set of outcomes to that ‘what if’ question – but can history provide pointers to what might actually have happened had Soviet cosmonauts reached the moon before the US in 1969?

How close did the Soviets really come to beating Nasa to the moon?

Whether you’re old enough to remember the space race as it unfolded, or you were born after the turn of the millennium, almost everyone around the world will be familiar with the images of Neil Armstrong and the crew of Apollo 11 taking their first steps on the moon.

“That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind,” Armstrong famously said – celebrating not the achievement of one nation but the collective advancement of the whole human race. These were revolutionary words, spoken at the height of the Cold War between his country and those behind the so-called Iron Curtain.

It is easy to forget just how close the Soviets came to stealing a march on the US. After all, the first artificial objects sent into space were the Soviet craft Sputnik 1 and 2, launched in 1957. And Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space in 1961.

Read more | The history of the first moon landing: the road to Apollo 11

Despite these early successes, the Soviets lacked the laser focus with which Nasa and the US targeted the moon through the Apollo programme, and suffered from the effects of a fractious administration managing multiple projects all competing for funding.

“It was a byzantine system beset by internal rivalry, nepotistic patronage and wasteful duplication,” Dr Thomas Ellis said of the Soviet space programme, speaking to HistoryExtra in 2021. In order to win the space race, the Soviet project would have needed to behave “like the American image of it”.

Star City presents a vision of history in which these issues were resolved, allowing the Soviets to win out. Interestingly, the show’s lead, played by Rhys Ifans and billed as chief designer, is the driving force behind the Soviet race to the moon. In season 2 of For All Mankind, it is implied that his character may have been inspired by Sergei Korolev, the real life ‘glavny konstruktor’ behind the rockets that put both Sputnik and Gagarin into orbit.

Korolev died in 1966, three years before the US reached the moon. “Had he lived longer, Korolev would have continued to be a crucial cog in the machine to achieve crewed space flight and in developing the N1 rocket (the Soviet version of the Saturn V),” Jonny Wilkes wrote in BBC History Revealed magazine in 2021.

Star City imagines a universe in which Korolev – or at least a Korolev analogue – lived long enough to see the Soviets beat the US to the moon.

How might the Cold War have unfolded after a Soviet moon landing?

Behind the scientific breakthroughs, speeches and rocket launches, an ideological war was being waged.

This conflict was about, amongst other things, the competing ideologies of capitalism and communism. And economic and social structures underpinned both US and Soviet approaches to the space race.

Had the Soviets beaten the US to the moon, might the Cold War have unfolded differently?

“There would have been huge celebrations in the Soviet Union,” said Ellis, “with parades and ceremonies symbolically linking the space heroes to the Communist Party’s role as the unquestioned guiding force.”

Such a victory would have provided the Soviets with a “huge, much-needed prestige boost… both at home and abroad,” Ellis noted – and a victory in the political and economic battle against capitalism epitomised by the US.

It might well have been Alexei Leonov, the first man to complete a spacewalk and the cosmonaut widely thought of as Neil Armstrong’s Soviet counterpart, written into the history books as the first man on the moon.

“Like the Apollo astronauts, these lunar cosmonauts would have followed a hero’s welcome in the homeland with a victory lap tour around the world,” Ellis continued.

Meanwhile, the Americans would have been left licking their wounds. Such a public defeat would have made the administration and its ideology look weak.

Read more | 8 weird stories from the Space Age: from hungry tortoises to gorilla suits

“Publicly, there would be gracious congratulations and invites to the White House,” Ellis added. “Privately, President Nixon would have been seething.” Such a defeat could have provided the requisite fuel for US politicians who sought a reduction in Nasa’s overall budget – people who, as Ellis noted, might have “disparaged space racing as the sort of propagandistic spectacle best left to the communists”.

For All Mankind suggests a different outcome. In that show, the space race never ends; instead, Americans and Soviets vie to reach various milestones in space exploration ahead of their rivals. “The Soviets would undoubtedly have continued exploring space [if they’d achieved the first moon landing],” said Ellis, “spending subsequent decades attempting to press their advantage.”

We see this idea borne out in For All Mankind, as the space race escalates in the decades after that landing, with attempts to establish permanent moon bases and even to reach Mars and beyond.

Ellis suggested that such goals would have created a very different political and economic landscape, fundamentally changing the latter half of the Cold War if Soviet funds were channelled into a spiralling pace race.

Might a Soviet moon landing have prevented the collapse of the USSR?

In the short term, that success would have provided a huge boost to the Soviet propaganda machine, allowing the moon landing to be hailed as a victory for communism on the world stage.

“A successful moonshot might well have provided a new potent diplomatic and propaganda tool,” commented Ellis, “and led to an uptick in membership for Third World communist parties.”

Read more | Animals in space: the creatures who paved the way for human travel beyond Earth

However, in the longer term it might have led to the downfall of the Soviet Union. “Prestige is powerful, but it wouldn’t have invalidated the economic and political weaknesses,” Ellis said. “Continued attempts by the Soviet Union to maintain their lead over the US may have served to highlight the structural problems deep-rooted within the Soviet economy. It is difficult to imagine a moonshot preventing the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union.”

Star City and For All Mankind offer glimpses of what might have been had the Soviets beaten the US to the moon in 1969 – and today’s world would be a very different place.

Star City premiered on 29 May on Apple TV. For All Mankind seasons 1–5 are all available to watch now on the service

Matthew Trask is a writer and journalist

The Cuban Ambassador Warns About Trump - Charlie Angus / The Resistance

2026-06-12T12:03:51.000Z

This past week, Meidas Canada was invited to the Cuban embassy in Ottawa.

Canada’s mainstream media gives enormous coverage to the views of the American ambassador. I felt it was important to extend the Cuban ambassador the opportunity to speak about the criminal actions of Washington.

I was honoured that Ambassador Rodrigo Malmierca Diaz invited me to sit down and ask him questions about the escalation of threats from Washington against the Cuban people.

The economic blockade is devastating. It is also a complete violation of international law. This is Washington asserting the “Donroe” doctrine of being able to crush the sovereignty of independent nations in our hemisphere.

The ambassador spoke of the huge impacts the blockade has had on health, the economy and the lives of children. He framed this issue within the broader context of a country’s right to choose its own sovereign path without threat or intimidation.

There is growing pressure on the Canadian government to support the MAGA threat against Cuba. But if we allow Trump to economically crush Cuba, we know that Canada will be his next target.

As Winston Churchill warned, the appeaser is the one who believes that by feeding others to the crocodile, the crocodile won’t eat them.

It doesn’t need to work this way. Trump can threaten our government but he can’t intimidate the Canadian people.

What Can We Do?

We need to call on our government to work multilaterally through the nations of this hemisphere to end the blockade.

We need to continue efforts to get supplies to the people in Cuba.

Containers 4 Cuba delivers desperately needed supplies to Cuban communities every month. I’ve written before about their efforts, and their work has become even more urgent as conditions continue to deteriorate.

If you would like to help, tax-deductible donations can be made:

By e-transfer to niagarawarehouseofhope@gmail.com, indicating the contribution is for Containers 4 Cuba, or
By cheque to The Niagara Warehouse of Hope at 46 Broadway Ave., St Catharines, ON, L2M 1M4, indicating the contribution for Containers 4 Cuba

If any photos or images on this site are under copyright, please let us know and we will provide appropriate credit. This content is used in accordance with applicable copyright laws, including “fair dealing” under Canadian law and “fair use” under Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act, for purposes such as criticism, comment, and news reporting.

This post is public — feel free to share it.

Masters of disinformation: how British spies played dirty in the Cold War - HistoryExtra

2026-06-12T10:41:43.000Z

They 'haunted' an Indonesian general with a talking ghost and planted fake hippies in a Bulgarian youth festival. But did they change the course of the Cold War? Rory Cormac introduces Spencer Mizen to the comically absurd – and dangerously controversial – tactics deployed by a group of misfits and mavericks charged with raining down confusion on Britain's adversaries in the 1950s and 60s.

Hear more from Rory Cormac on the HistoryExtra podcast, listen to him discussing Queen Victoria's spy network here

The real history behind your favourite William Morris designs - HistoryExtra

2026-06-12T08:17:29.000Z

At a time in the 19th century when factories were reshaping society, William Morris and his contemporaries believed mass production was damaging not only the lives of workers, but also the beauty and meaning of everyday objects.

HistoryExtra's Elinor Evans shares the hidden meaning behind some of the prints, including Strawberry Thief, many of which remain popular today.

You'll hear excerpts from a HistoryExtra podcast interview with author and curator Dr Suzanne Fagence Cooper, who has written extensively on the Pre-Raphaelites and Victorian women, and William and Jane Morris – her books include How We Might Live: At Home with Jane and William Morris (Quercus, 2022).

View Green Video on the source website

History crossword: 5 June - HistoryExtra

2026-06-12T08:01:27.000Z

View Riddle on the source website

Athens vs Sparta was ancient Greece's greatest rivalry – but who came out on top? - HistoryExtra

2026-06-10T15:00:30.000Z

No one has ever had much reason to go to Sphacteria. This tiny island, less than 3 miles long, sits off the south-west coast of the Greek Peloponnese. On the nearby shore the land is poor for agriculture, while the rocky island is even less appealing. In 425 BC, no one lived on the island and even the mainland was sparsely populated, making this just about the least important stretch of territory belonging to the city-state of Sparta.

That all changed when the Athenians, in the seventh year of their conflict with the Spartans, decided to fortify a small base on a headland. This provocation – largely symbolic – prompted an immediate Spartan response. They besieged the fort and rowed some 400 soldiers over to Sphacteria, so that they could help surround the Athenians. However, soon afterwards a squadron of the powerful Athenian navy arrived and took control of the bay. Instead of helping to blockade the Athenian fort, the Spartans on Sphacteria were themselves isolated.

Even so, they were Spartans, the most famous fighting men of all the Greeks, which meant that the Athenians hesitated before attacking Sphacteria directly. Then luck intervened: a cooking fire started a wildfire that burned away the scrub which up until then had concealed the defenders. The Athenians also managed to achieve surprise, killing the slumbering guards left to watch the landing spot. Though outnumbered many times over, the remaining Spartans hefted their big round shields and adopted the close formation known in ancient Greece as the phalanx, advancing to meet the attackers in battle.

The approach of a Spartan phalanx, those hardy warriors marching in step and in eerie silence, must have been immensely daunting for the Athenians. The Spartans’ indomitable reputation had been sealed in 480 BC, when 300 warriors had famously held the pass at Thermopylae for three days against vastly more numerous Persian forces until the invaders had found a way to circle round and attack them from behind.

Unsurprisingly, then, the Athenians wanted to avoid hand-to-hand fighting, and had brought hundreds of archers and other missile-armed troops. For hours under a baking sun, the Spartans, charged; the Athenians dodged out of the way and, one by one, the Spartans were shot down, their leader killed and his deputy felled. Soon the survivors were surrounded.

Read more | Nude inspections, thigh flashers and fights to the death: 15 things you need to know about the Spartans

At Thermopylae, the 300 had fought to the last man under a hail of Persian arrows, their valour and determination striking awe into allies and enemies alike. But 55 years later, the men on Sphacteria made a different choice. One-hundred-and-twenty Spartans and 172 allied soldiers laid down their weapons and submitted – this time, accepting capture over death. When an Athenian suggested that the bravest men were those who had died, one Spartan prisoner responded that the arrow “would be worth a great deal if it could distinguish the brave”. The captives were marched off to Athens – and, to make matters worse, the Spartans were forced to halt their annual summer invasions of Athenian territory.

Nothing like this had ever happened before. For those familiar with the fight-to-the-death Spartan stand at Thermopylae, the outcome of the battle of Sphacteria would have appeared shocking, even humiliating. But that was not the only way in which the events of 425 BC diverged from the heroics of ‘the 300’. At Thermopylae the Spartans had made their last stand as the head of an alliance of Greek states with the Athenians as the most important of these allies. Together, they had turned back invasion by Persia, the superpower of the age, in a victory against the odds that both celebrated as their finest hour. Yet afterwards both cities became suspicious of the other, then rivals and finally enemies, in a conflict that tore apart the Greek world. How did allies become deadly foes?

Allies against invaders

At the start of the fifth century, the Athenians and Spartans had been drawn together to defend against a massive invasion of the Greek mainland by Persian forces. Thermopylae, for all its heroism, was a defeat. But it was followed later that year with victory by a Spartan-led – albeit predominantly Athenian – fleet off the island of Salamis. A year later, in 479 BC, a Spartan commanded the coalition army that smashed the Persians on land at Plataea. This time, Sparta’s warriors played the most prominent role, though the Athenians also made a telling contribution.

The Spartans had the reputation of being the strongest military power among the Greeks. It was they who had originally called for an alliance of independent city-states from across the Greek peninsula to unite in opposition to the Persians. Their prestige ensured that a Spartan was always in command – even at sea, though they had scarcely any prior experience of ships and sea-fighting.

The Greek alliance comprised dozens of independent cities, bonded by a common language intelligible to all and by shared stories and cults, in particular of the Olympian gods. Independent cities were neighbours, often very close neighbours. Only a minority of their inhabitants had political rights: adult male citizens, who were invariably outnumbered by women, children, resident foreigners and slaves. The city was the physical centre but the citizens were really what mattered. Belonging to any of these communities was a source of immense pride, and political rights were always tied to a willingness to fight on behalf of the community.

Read more | The ancient Greeks had six essential tips for health. How many do you do?

Some city-states were tiny, with fewer than 1,000 inhabitants and barely 10 square miles of land. Athens and Sparta were among the largest. Sparta, in the south-east Peloponnese, controlled considerably more territory than Athens but had few citizens in proportion to its size. Spartiates, or ‘peers’, comprised an elite group freed from the need to work because labour was undertaken by the helots who tended the land, their status somewhere between slaves and serfs. These descendants of a conquered race were mocked and humiliated. As the poet Tyrtaeus put it, helots were forced to hand over half of all they produced to masters, then to feign sorrow when a master died. Meanwhile, peers devoted themselves to being full-time citizens, debating, exercising and, above all, training for war.

Attica, the region controlled by Athens, was less extensive and less fertile than the rich plains of Sparta. Athenian society was very different to its Spartan equivalent: there was, for example, no equivalent to the helots, though there were slaves. More men owned farms, and most worked the land alongside hired and servile labour.

Citizens and sailors

Not too long before the Persian invasions, the last tyrant to rule Athens was expelled, and the city became a democracy – ruled by the people, or demos. Wealth still mattered, but any citizen (men only) could vote and voice his opinion in the frequent meetings of the People’s Assembly. There were significantly more Athenian citizens than there were Spartan peers, and they were more outward-looking. Athens, close to a natural harbour, had ready access to the sea and to trade.

Democracy and the wider world view came together when Athenians voted to use profits from communally owned silver mines to create a fleet of 200 triremes – the supreme warships of the day. Without this newly created armada, the victory at Salamis would have been impossible and the Persian invasion would have succeeded.

So Sparta initially led the military action in the coalition, but Athens played a vital role – and expected to be honoured accordingly. Then, after Athens became the greatest naval power in the Aegean, it spearheaded efforts to drive Persian influence back beyond the coast of Asia – something Sparta was neither equipped nor prepared to do. As a result, the Athenians came to lead an alliance that transformed into more of an empire, comprising more than 150 city-states.

For the tiny coastal and island communities in the alliance, this was an arrangement with strings attached. They contributed money to enjoy the protection of the Athenian navy, and it was soon made clear that they were not allowed to break loose.

Athens grew powerful, wealthy and bullishly confident, believing that this success was the Athenians’ natural due, reflecting their own inherent worth and the superiority of their political system. Pericles, the prominent statesman and general, captured Athenians’ pride in this political system perfectly when he declared: “It is true that our government is called a democracy, because its administration is in the hands, not of the few, but of the many.”

Drama, comedy, art and architecture celebrated the glory of the Athenians, symbolised most powerfully by the temple built at the top of the Athenian Acropolis: the Parthenon.

The Spartans were willing to honour the Athenians – but not to accept them as equals. Sparta’s status, in the eyes of the helots, their allies and themselves, rested on the certainty that they were acknowledged as the supreme military power in the Greek world. Nothing could be allowed to erode that status, because the privileged lifestyle of the peers depended on it.

Yet the Spartans found it increasingly hard to maintain this primacy. In c465 BC, a series of major earth tremors devastated much of their region. Many lives were lost, but worse followed when a number of the helots saw the resulting chaos as a chance to rebel, leading to a war that lasted almost 10 years. In 462 BC, the Spartans asked for help, and many allies, including the Athenians, responded by sending troops to aid them.

The relationship sours

Athens’ assistance should have cemented its alliance with the Spartans, but something went badly wrong. Did the Spartans treat these strangers in their land poorly? Did the Athenians conduct themselves in a way that offended their hosts? Did they show some sympathy for the helots? It’s impossible to know. What we do know, though, is that the Spartans told the Athenians – and only the Athenians – that their services were no longer required, and sent them home. This humiliating dismissal prompted the 10-year exile of the pro-Spartan Athenian commander, who had claimed that Athens and Sparta were the two legs supporting the Greeks, each of mutual benefit to the other.

Read more | The Peloponnesian War: Athens fights Sparta for dominance in ancient Greece

Relations between these two Greek superpowers now lurched into a downward spiral. Over the following decades, Athens and Sparta came to view each other as dangerous rivals rather than useful allies. By then, the Persians no longer seemed much of a threat, their vast empire preoccupied with internal power struggles. With no prospect of a further Persian invasion, all of the Greek city-states became more concerned with getting one over on their rivals. Each sought every opportunity to make themselves stronger and to diminish everyone else’s power and reputation.

The bitter rivalry between Athens and Sparta added an extra dimension to this competitive spirit, simply because both city-states were so big and powerful. No one could stay out of any resulting conflicts, not least because there was always the danger that a local rival would enlist the Athenians or Spartans as powerful allies.

And conflict between Athens and Sparta duly followed – most notably in the Peloponnesian War of 431–404 BC. Their armies never actually clashed in a major land battle throughout this long conflict; even in skirmishes such as that at Sphacteria, they rarely confronted one another face to face. That didn’t stop the Peloponnesian War exacting an appalling cost in lives but, more often than not, it was allies who were doing the fighting and dying, rather than the men of Athens and Sparta themselves.

One reason why the two superpowers rarely confronted one another directly in battle was that the Athenians feared and avoided the Spartan phalanx, trusting more in naval might. That didn’t always suffice. Overconfidence, fuzzy strategy and abysmal leadership led to disaster in Sicily in 413 BC, when the city-state of Syracuse, assisted by a single Spartan officer as military advisor, routed an Athenian invasion force.

One of the greatest ironies of the Peloponnesian War was that the Athenians and, especially, the Spartans sought funds from Persia to help them fight their fellow Greeks. War was expensive – particularly war at sea, which required great fleets of triremes.

In the war’s early years, the Persians were content to let their former enemies, so long allied against them, slaughter one another. But the Spartans kept sending envoys to the Persian king requesting aid, while remaining vague about what they could offer him in return. The Athenians captured a letter sent by the Persians in reply to one of these entreaties, in which the latter expressed bafflement at what it was the Spartans actually wanted. If the Spartans really were (as they claimed) fighting to free the Greek states from the tyranny of Athens, why were they willing to allow some of those states to fall back under Persian rule as they offered?

Sea change

The Athenians continued to flirt with the Persian satraps, but failed to secure significant support. The Spartans, meanwhile, obtained plentiful Persian gold to fund the creation of new fleets, but still suffered setbacks against the more experienced maritime fighters of Athens. In 410 BC, the Spartan admiral Mindarus was defeated and killed at Cyzicus (in what’s now western Anatolia, Turkey) after being lured into an Athenian trap. His successor’s report was blunt: “Ships lost. Mindarus dead. Men starving. Don’t know what to do.”

Despite such defeats, the Spartans’ ability to secure more Persian gold than their enemies ultimately proved decisive. It enabled the Spartans to replace the ships and sailors they’d lost at Cyzicus, and it provided them with the military hardware
to grind down the Athenians.

The moment of truth came in 405 BC, when the Spartan commander Lysander obliterated an Athenian fleet at Aegospotami on the Hellespont, the narrow strait separating Europe from Asia. The Athenians could not replace the money and manpower they had exhausted in this fatal reversal. The following year, they were forced to lay down their arms and surrender.

Athens lost the Peloponnesian War and also its empire. Sparta was supreme, although the moment proved fleeting, for soon the Spartans were widely resented and in time humbled. In contrast Athens soon revived its democracy, growing wealthy and strong again – if never quite as strong as before the war.

This, of course, is not just a tale of Athens and Sparta. It’s also the story of the dozens of city-states that made up the ancient Greek world. The rumbling rivalry between those two powers made all of them weaker – too weak, in fact, to resist Philip II of Macedon’s campaign of conquest in the mid-fourth century BC. Philip was succeeded by an even greater conqueror: his son, Alexander the Great. And when Alexander set his sights on global domination from 336 BC, Spartan and Athenian hegemony over the Greek world was consigned to history.

Adrian Goldsworthy is a historian of ancient civilisations. His latest book, Athens and Sparta: The Rivalry That Shaped Ancient Greece, was published by Apollo in April

This article was first published in the June 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine

The Work We Do Matters - Charlie Angus / The Resistance

2026-06-10T12:03:20.000Z

Earlier this week, I held a press conference in Ottawa to lay out a series of allegations of foreign interference in the Alberta referendum campaign.

No media came. Well, almost none. There was one observer from a right-wing Alberta publication. But none of the major national outlets bothered to attend.

I’m not surprised. They never show up.

Charlie speaki…

Churchill's toughest decision - HistoryExtra

2026-06-10T08:09:23.000Z

In the summer of 1940, the Royal Navy attacked a French fleet moored off the coast of north Africa, killing almost 1300 sailors. Winston Churchill described his decision to green-light the operation as the toughest he ever had to take. But was it the right decision? In this episode of the HistoryExtra podcast, Edward Abel Smith talks to Spencer Mizen about an episode that would shake Britain's wartime relations with both the French and the Americans.

To hear more from Edward Abel Smith, don't miss our podcast episode on the remarkable life of Nicholas Winton, the British Schindler, who helped hundreds of Jewish children escape Czechoslovakia on the eve of the Second World War

The Threat to Canada Is Coming From the White House - Charlie Angus / The Resistance

2026-06-09T12:03:50.000Z

This past week, the ambassador of a foreign country, Pete Hoekstra, publicly stated that Canada’s sovereignty would be a “great discussion” in the upcoming trade negotiations with the Trump administration.

Mr. Hoekstra revealed his contempt for Canada, its history, and its values. But his comments also signal an escalating level of foreign interference and intimidation from the Washington regime.

We must take these threats seriously.

I am particularly concerned about attempts to destabilize our nation by promoting the Alberta separatist cause.

We are seeing an explosion of online foreign actors spreading disinformation and hate about Canada and Alberta. This pattern of fake pages and offshore BOT farms to stoke division is right out of the Brexit playbook.

I was member of the parliamentary committee on foreign online interference following the Cambridge Analytica scandal. I participated in the international hearings on electoral interference in London and then in Washington.

We saw the pattern of foreign actors exploiting front groups and stolen personal data to upend democratic elections.

It was a playbook from Donbas to Brexit to Trump 2016 to the election of Jair Bolsonaro.

All of those red flags are present in the Alberta separatist campaign, including the notorious Internet Research Agency of Russia. They played a pivotal role in Brexit and the 2016 Trump victory and were subject to a major Justice Department investigation after it was too late.

Is Canada naïve enough to think things will be different this time?

But the most serious threat to Canada is coming from the White House.

For this reason, I am calling on Anton Boegman, the newly appointed Foreign Interference Transparency Commissioner, to launch an investigation into efforts by the Trump administration and other political actors to destabilize our country.

Specifically, I am asking him to investigate a series of meetings held between top State Department officials and a small group of Alberta separatists.

In February 2025, Donald Trump stated that the only way Canada could win concessions in trade negotiations was to agree to give our nation over to the MAGA regime.

That same week, then-Prime Minister Trudeau told business leaders that Trump was serious about his determination to break our nation.

Within days, a group calling themselves the Republican Party of Alberta, led by an ex-US Marine, filed papers with Elections Alberta with the stated goal of breaking up our country. They deliberately adopted the name of the foreign political entity determined to destroy our nation.

Less than two month later, a group of Alberta separatists were invited to the first of a series of meetings with US officials in Washington.

Alberta separatist Dennis Modry stated,

“I met the senior U.S. administrative officials just a couple steps away from the president himself.
“When we walked into the conference room, the first comment was ‘we recognize and support Alberta becoming the sovereign nation.”

Who arranged this meeting? Are Canadians expected to believe that this marginal group could call up the White House and simply walk through the door? Were these meetings organized by the American embassy in Ottawa or from the White House directly?

Mr. Modry states the first meeting was in a boardroom just a couple of steps from the president.

So who represented the President in these meetings?

Modry claimed that the $500 million offer was put on the table to make the transition from Canada possible.

Which American officials made this financial offer?

I share Premier David Eby’s concern that what we are facing is treason.

Treason and conspiracy.

The Alberta separatists claim that discussions were held on propping up Alberta’s currency in the event that Alberta tried to break away from Confederation.

Who was authorized to make this offer? Was Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent or any of his staff part of these negotiations?

Mr. Bessent has openly stated that the breakup of our nation is a priority of the Trump administration.

I also want to raise the issue of the massive leak of the personal information of every single voter in Alberta.

It is essential that we determine who has accessed that stolen data.

Is there a connection between the Michigan-based 10Xvotes apps, the separatists and the stolen data?

Is there any connection to Ambassador Pete Hoekstra, who had heavily promoted the 10Xvotes APP?

We cannot treat the theft of voter data as simply a privacy breach it must be investigated through the larger lens of foreign threat.

Under Section 2 of the ACT, the Commissioner has the full authority to investigate foreign interference in provincial referendums.

Under the same section of the ACT, he is obligated to investigate financial arrangements being offered by foreign powers.

I have read the federal inquiry into foreign interference of 2024, and there is nothing in any of that evidence that comes even close to the allegations of meetings with foreign officials and offers of money to break up our country.

Imagine if you will, if say China or Iran invited Canadian citizens to top-level meetings in those national capitals with a plan to break up our country, they would rightly be charged with treason.

In the past, the Canadian government has expelled diplomatic staff from foreign embassies who interfered in our national interests. None of those countries openly discussed breaking up our nation.

Will there be an investigation into the US embassy’s role in potential political interference?

And will there be consequences if those links are uncovered?

The Commissioner has the power to summon witnesses and compel them to give oral or written evidence on oath or solemn affirmation.

He has the power to compel documents.

He must act.

This is not about trusting in the polling. This is an organized destabilization campaign to undermine our nation at a time of unprecedented threat.

I have three clear asks.

First, I call upon Anton Boegman, the Foreign Influence Transparency Commissioner, to launch an investigation into the role of foreign actors from the United States and other offshore actors in this attempt to destabilize Canada’s domestic politics.

Second, I urge Foreign Minister Anita Anand to call in Ambassador Pete Hoekstra and demand an explanation for his interference in our country’s affairs. Are we to believe he didn’t know about offers of money being put on the table from the White House to drive the breakup of our nation?

Third, I call on the people of Canada to write to Commissioner Boegman and demand that he take the threat to our sovereignty with the utmost gravity it deserves.

This is our country, and we are under threat as never before.

Every Canadian has a stake in the outcome of this investigation.

Our sovereignty is at stake.

Fellow resisters, we must make every effort to preserve our democracy and independence. So that we might remain a nation rooted in democratic values – true, north, strong and free.

The Government of Canada has not provided a public email address for contacting the commissioner. Instead we’re supposed to contact the Department of Public Safety’s media office to speak with him: media@ps-sp.gc.ca

Mail correspondence for Commissioner Boegman can be sent to:

Office of the Foreign Influence Transparency Commissioner
Public Safety Canada
340 Laurier Avenue West
Ottawa, ON K1A 0P9

1-800-830-3118

If any photos or images on this site are under copyright, please let us know and we will provide appropriate credit. This content is used in accordance with applicable copyright laws, including “fair dealing” under Canadian law and “fair use” under Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act, for purposes such as criticism, comment, and news reporting.

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Henry Paget: life of the week - HistoryExtra

2026-06-09T08:14:52.000Z

Henry Paget, 5th Marquess of Anglesey, lived a life of extravagance, luxury and theatre – and for this, he was the subject of much intrigue. In this episode, Michael Hall speaks to Charlotte Vosper about Henry's life story and the legacy of a man dubbed the 'Dancing Marquess'.

If you'd like to hear more from Michael about the queer lives connected to the National Trust and it's properties, then check out our discussion of his latest book A Queer Inheritance

Jane Austen: The final years of a literary genius - HistoryExtra

2026-06-09T07:00:17.000Z

What does Austen’s later writing tell us about her changing ideas? And what factors contributed to her death?

In this fourth and final episode of our series chronicling the novelist’s life and work, Dr Lizzie Rogers charts the last part of Austen’s story, and her enormous continuing influence.

Watch now or listen below:

View Green Video on the source website

Want to go further into the world of Jane Austen and her literary creations? HistoryExtra's Lauren Good rounds up some essential reading, listening and viewing from the HistoryExtra and BBC History Magazine archive to deepen your understanding of Austen's life, her work and the Regency era in which she wrote. Go beyond the podcast.

Even wilder than Bridgerton: inside the scandalous world of Georgian masked balls - HistoryExtra

2026-06-08T15:30:22.000Z

Elizabeth Chudleigh adjusted her mask as she approached the entrance to the opera house. The flickering candlelight from chandeliers winked at her from inside the magnificent building, beckoning her to the masquerade. A mischievous Harlequin, flock of giddy shepherdesses and a handful of dominos pushed past her, all eager to join the revelry.

As she eyed their costumes, Chudleigh could have been forgiven for questioning her own choice of dress. She had adopted the guise of Iphigenia – a well-known character from Greek antiquity, who was sacrificed to the Gods during the Trojan Wars – and, with the help of the popular actor Susannah Cibber, had been transformed into a truly striking figure. Her masquerade habit (costume) would explode 18th-century London’s expectations of dress and decorum, revealing far more than it concealed.

Another few steps brought Chudleigh closer to the door. Doubtless, her nerves were now jangling. She was, she may have thought to herself, beginning to understand how Iphigenia felt during those final, terrible moments before meeting her fate.

However, while Iphigenia was the innocent victim of the goddess Artemis’s whims, Chudleigh’s nerves were wholly self-inflicted. She had made this choice herself. But was it the right choice? She could lose her post as maid of honour in the Princess of Wales’ household if her plan went awry.

Though she was in disguise, recognition was the ultimate purpose of Chudleigh’s gamble. Upon discovery, her reputation and status would either be ruthlessly slaughtered on the altar of the masquerade or immortalised, cementing her place among high society. If she harboured second thoughts, now was the time to retreat, for once she stepped through the doorway of the King’s Theatre, there was no turning back.

Chudleigh presented her ticket and strode boldly into the heaving crowd. It wasn’t long before heads started to turn and spirited conversations faded to whispers. Everyone was asking the same questions: “Who is that?” and “WHAT is she wearing?” Covered by little more than a sheer gauze top and long, flowing skirt, Chudleigh’s breasts were prominently on display for all to see, while her face remained hidden behind the mask. She could feel the gazes of countless eyes consuming and scrutinising her as she moved through the foyer and into the theatre itself.

Among the stunned spectators were the social reformer Elizabeth Montagu, and Chudleigh’s childhood friend and masquerade connoisseur Horace Walpole. Both were utterly astounded by the brazen maid of honour who was, observed Walpole, “so naked that you would have taken her for Andromeda”. Montagu recalled that “Miss Chudleigh’s dress or rather undress was remarkable”.

A besotted king

Not all in attendance were dazzled by the bare-breasted Chudleigh, however. Augusta, Princess of Wales, was so alarmed at the state of her maid of honour that she descended on Chudleigh with a shawl, which Chudleigh quickly shrugged aside. The other maids of honour – though they themselves were not particularly pure or chaste – “were so offended, they would not speak to her” for the entire evening.

This disapproval might have proved fatal to Elizabeth’s future in Augusta’s household had she not attracted the attention of an elderly man in “an old-fashioned English habit”. Under the mask was none other than King George II, who was a lifelong patron of the masquerade – and utterly besotted by Chudleigh. Her risqué dress had captured his attention; her sparkling charm and sharp wit secured it. Indeed, George II was so entranced by Chudleigh that she became a favoured mistress and earned a coveted place among his inner circle.

Read more | Bridgerton: the real history explained

Not only did Chudleigh gain notoriety within the fashionable elite, she became an overnight sensation. In the days and weeks that followed the masquerade, stories and prints of her scandalous dress flooded newspapers and print shop windows. At least six different depictions of her (and her bare breasts) circulated across London, while teasing lines of verse captured the combination of humour, daring and scandal Chudleigh embodied as Iphigenia.

That one extraordinary appearance at the King’s Theatre would bring Elizabeth Chudleigh status, connections and celebrity. She would go on to earn many epithets later in life, including duchess, countess and (after remarrying while her first husband was still alive) bigamist. But few would forget the evening in which she transformed herself into Iphigenia. She took the masquerade for all it was worth and used this elite space to defy social standards and display herself and her sexuality on her own terms. In doing so, Chudleigh earned herself an enduring legacy in wider masquerade culture.

Wildly popular

By the time Elizabeth Chudleigh was setting hearts a flutter and tongues flapping in 1749, the masquerade had not only become a fashionable fixture in the London season, it had permeated wider British culture – appearing in theatre, literature, art and print.

Though it had had a floundering start on the south banks of the Thames in the early 1700s, the masquerade became wildly popular in its new home, the King’s Theatre, Haymarket, under the careful direction of Swiss impresario and opera house manager Johann Jakob Heidegger. Heidegger transformed this European court entertainment into a commercial enterprise, selling tickets and using the profits to help fund his productions.

While the tickets to the grand entertainment were available for purchase – and, therefore, technically accessible to everyone – extortionate pricing meant that only those in the highest echelons of London society could afford it. The additional expenses of a masquerade habit and transportation, either by sedan chair or carriage, created a further financial obstacle for anyone in the middling or lower ranks.

Of course, such costs were of little concern to the beau monde – comprised of the nobility, gentry and a select group of fashionable actors, artists and merchants – and it wasn’t long before they were flaunting their privilege, wealth and taste on the elite stage provided by the masquerade.

While the decision to come as a character, wear a bejewelled dress or drape a domino cloak over existing clothing was left to the discretion of the participant, a mask was mandatory. It was the mask, after all, that gave the masquerade its name, and it was the mask that distinguished the masquerade from other popular forms of assembly such as balls, ridottos and fetes.

This thrill of discovery helped turn the masquerade into a cultural phenomenon. In a time of increasing access to consumer goods and leisure spaces, masquerades hit the sweet spot of the Georgian love of spectacle, display and fashionability. The capital’s glitterati used them as a watering hole where they could reinforce their superiority through material displays of wealth. This made recognition – rather than disguise – the prevailing feature of these elite gatherings.

And these were gatherings that seized the imaginations of Britons of all social backgrounds. Those who couldn’t afford to attend the masquerade themselves could always join the masses thronging the route to the opera house in the hours before the event, or they could admire proceedings as a paying spectator from the theatre’s gallery. Some even treated themselves to the plentiful memorabilia – ranging from porcelain figures and handkerchiefs to engravings – produced to capitalise on the masquerade phenomenon.

How to be a master of disguise

10 do's and don'ts when attending a masquerade

1. Don't be late! The roads to the King’s Theatre can become congested with spectators, political mobs and fellow revellers. So, whether you’re travelling to the masquerade by sedan chair or carriage, leave yourself at least an hour to get there. 2. Don't forget your invite

Make sure you have your ticket ready for inspection at the door. You will need to sign your name on it and seal it with wax before your arrival – otherwise the sentries may well turn you away. 3. Dress to impress From the moment you begin your journey to the masquerade, you will be on display for all to see. Whether dazzling, daring or decorous, your costume projects your status, taste and wealth. So use it to your best advantage. 4. Ditch the black domino This characterless cloak is the scourge of the masquerade – spurned by impresarios, fellow maskers and newspapers alike. While it offers a fast disguise for those lacking imagination, the billowing cape, tricorn hat and bauta mask reap gloom rather than glamour. 5. Show some decorum While a mask might protect you from immediate recognition, you are still beholden to the social expectations of the time, namely politeness and civility. If you are caught brawling, using offensive language, or setting a bad example for servants or waiters, you will be removed promptly. 6. Spot the royal

The masquerade is a favoured pastime of several monarchs, including George I, George II, and Christian VII (the King of Denmark). The Prince of Wales, future George IV, is perhaps the most passionate royal masquerader – often found sporting fake noses and colourful domino cloaks. 7. Bring your A-game The masquerade is no place to run out of energy – you’ll be expected to feast, dance and gossip the whole night through. The doors to the theatre open around 9 o’clock and the revelry often continues after the clock has struck 4am. 8. Get into character

You can find inspiration for your costume all around you – in the theatre, literature, art, history and mythology, not to mention masquerade warehouses. Whatever you select, make sure to bring your character to life, be it a mischievous Harlequin, demure Quaker, or irksome devil. 9. Arrive on an empty stomach The sideboards are laden with the most sumptuous confections – sweetmeats, fruits and ices – while wine, orgeat (a sweet syrup) and bubbles will be flowing all night. 10. Don't forget to wear a mask! But choose wisely. Wax masks can provide deceptive disguises but are pungent and sticky. A silk or papier-mâché mask might be a better choice as the wine flows and the heat of the opera house rises.

Den of debauchery

Yet not everyone was enamoured of what they saw unfolding at the King’s Theatre. As masquerade grew in popularity, so its critics grew in number. The bishop of London, Edmund Gibson; prominent author and magistrate Henry Fielding; and satirical engraver William Hogarth all raised their voices in opposition to the entertainment. They argued the masquerade was a den of debauchery and that its continued presence in London would lead to social upheaval and an irredeemable state of national immorality.

Hogarth, who believed the masquerade represented the corruptive and corrosive power of Italian art and culture, lambasted the entertainment and its patrons in two of his earliest self-commissioned engravings Masquerades and Operas, or, the Bad Taste of the Town and Masquerade Ticket. It was a theme he would return to throughout his career, using masquerade tickets, masks and habits in his later works A Harlot’s Progress and Marriage A-la-Mode to make overt associations between the entertainment and prostitution and vice.

But the criticisms did little to stop masquerade from growing into Georgian London’s most expensive and extravagant pastime. Meanwhile, masqueraders drew inspiration for their costumes from an ever more diverse well of sources.

Read more | From a clairvoyant chicken to a fake Shakespeare: 8 hoaxes that fooled Georgian Britain

The British empire grew rapidly across the 18th century – and, as they encountered the new cultures, peoples, foods and fashions descending on London, masqueraders increasingly dressed in costumes with truly global influences. The King of Denmark’s masquerade in 1768 saw white masqueraders dressed as nabobs (officials in the East India Company), “Chinamen”, enslaved people and a host of other “characters”.

Miss Kitty Cambridge and her chaperone, Mrs Agneta Yorke, who both attended in Indian costumes, recalled that among the most entertaining and curious characters that evening were “Miss Pelham [who] was a blackymoor” and the actor Mr Mendez, dressed as “a black slave”. He “had black’d his skin and put on the wool with great propriety, he had a diamond necklace about his neck which had a very good effect”. According to the The Gentleman’s Magazine, Mendez was dressed in the character of Mungo, an enslaved worker, from the new comic opera The Padlock.

Costumes like these were a feature of masquerades across the century and often appeared the next day in correspondence and newspaper reports. Yet such racial transgression went exclusively in one direction. While white masqueraders might choose to portray figures from across the world – ranging from Pacific Islanders to Native Americans – people of colour were expected to dress as other people of colour, or in the neutral domino character.

Julius Soubise, a formerly enslaved Afro-Caribbean servant, often attended masquerades as Mungo. This, combined with his penchant for flamboyant dress, resulted in him being known as the ‘Mungo Macaroni’ in popular culture.

In the semi-fictional, semi-factual novel Nocturnal Revels, Soubise purportedly plans to whiten his face and dress in a sultan masquerade habit. The idea is immediately rebuffed by his acquaintance, who suggests selecting a costume better suited to Soubise’s complexion. In most instances, then, masquerade reinforced rather than challenged negative stereotypes and wider colonial power structures.

Gender boundaries

Yet it wasn’t just racial boundaries that were placed under the spotlight when Britain’s elite congregated at the King’s Theatre. Following their promenade across the stage of the opera house, Mrs Yorke and her charge reported that “the cleverest masks were two old women”. One of those women was, in fact, a man: Henry Seymour Conway. Known to play characters in the most convincing manner, Conway often took to dressing across gender – both engaging with conceptions of effeminacy, and styling himself in imitation of fashionable ladies or cantankerous elders.

Years earlier, Conway had gone to great lengths to impersonate the Duchess of Manchester, seeking her out at the theatre and other public spaces to learn her mannerisms and speech. Though unable to find her, Conway managed to present a convincing female figure donning “a loose sack and black silk mask” and peacock plumes taken “out of my sister Jenny’s wardrobe which I ransacked without reserve”.

If men could dress as women, so women could dress as men, taking on the guise of marquis and pageboys, or donning the masculine black domino and tricorn hat. In 1771 the “celebrated belles” of the fashionable elite, Mrs Crewe and her friend Mrs Bouverie, “were dressed as men, having borrowed the fierce smart hats of their friends and superiors, they looked full as well, and as masculine as they do!” This backhanded compliment flattered the ladies, while poking fun at the men in their political coterie, namely Charles James Fox – who would go on to serve as Britain’s foreign secretary – and his Whig colleagues.

Read more | From balls to Bridgerton: a brief history of debutantes and the social season

Prodigious feathers

Gender play was also expressed in symbolic costume, most notably in 1775 when a man and lady appeared at the King’s Theatre dressed as components of each other’s wardrobe. The woman wore “a very large pair of breeches that reached from her feet to the top of her head, where the waistband was fastened, and crowned with a prodigious bunch of ostrich feathers”. Her male partner sported “a petticoat that covered his whole figure with a ducal coronet, ornamented with jewels on his head”.

The pair would have made for a strange sight, but there was method to their unconventional costume. Their outfits were intended as a satire on the Duke and Duchess of Gordon, a Scottish power couple whose marriage, it seems, did not conform to societal norms. In a patriarchal world, the duchess was known in society circles to be rather overbearing. It was she who, as the costumes so stingingly observed, wore the breeches in the relationship.

By the time the ersatz Duke and Duchess of Gordon made their unforgettable appearance at the King’s Theatre, the opera house was losing its monopoly status in the world of masquerade. In the early 1770s, Carlisle House in Soho Square and the Pantheon on Oxford Street emerged as serious rivals, both venues drawing masqueraders’ attention and spending power away from the Haymarket.

In an effort to retain the patronage of the elite – and attract new business from the aspiring middling sorts – the King’s Theatre needed to be creative and competitive. Lowering ticket prices, hosting Venetian-themed masquerades and offering private supper boxes for the upper ranks helped keep the masquerade afloat for a while. But, by the end of the century, the elite’s tastes had begun to change. Visual displays of status slowly lost their allure, as the shine of the nobility and gentry was, in the eyes of some, tarnished by the infiltration of their social ‘inferiors’.

Across the Victorian period, masquerades retreated into townhouses, evolved into fancy dress balls and became a chiefly middle-class pursuit as the aristocracy lost interest and began to seek entertainment elsewhere.

The once glamorous and outrageous Georgian masquerade soon faded to the periphery, but its legacy has not. Recognition, fashion and display remain prominent components of fancy dress and celebrity culture, while the masquerade itself continues to captivate imaginations in novels, movies and period dramas. Masquerade’s ability to reflect, enable and challenge wider tensions and power structures – mixed with its reputation for extravagance and intrigue – make it as relevant in the 21st century as the evening Elizabeth Chudleigh walked through the entrance of the King’s Theatre and caused a sensation.

Meghan Kobza is a historian of leisure, culture, costume and commercialisation in the 18th and 19th centuries. Her latest book, The Masquerade: A History of Extravagance and Intrigue, was published by Yale in May

This article was first published in the June 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine

The hidden history of female sexual pleasure - HistoryExtra

2026-06-08T15:02:37.000Z

How did women in the past experience sex and pleasure? Kate Lister reveals that this is a rather complicated question. Instead of simply lying back and thinking of England, women's sexual experiences have been bound up in cultures of shame and control since antiquity. But women have also fought for their right to pleasure. Speaking to Charlotte Vosper, Kate introduces us to these histories.

Please note that this episode contains a very frank and open discussion of sex and sexuality, and strong language throughout.

If you'd like to learn even more about sex toys from the past, then check out this eye-opening article about history's 12 strangest examples

Curse of the copycats: inside history's biggest plagiarism scandals - HistoryExtra

2026-06-07T14:30:31.000Z

There is a famous quote by TS Eliot, which claims that “immature poets imitate; mature poets steal”. In an age when lawyers fiercely protect corporations’ intellectual property – a world of film franchises worth billions and pre-emptive patents – it’s safe to say that many people disagree with that sentiment.

But how was plagiarism dealt with in the past? In some eras, borrowing from other people’s work was accepted – even encouraged. At other times, it was frowned upon. The picture is further complicated by the fact that not every accusation of plagiarism is shown to be true, and nor is every instance intentional.

Here, Roger Kreuz examines 12 of history’s most famous plagiarism cases – from philosophical falsehoods to fanfic furores.

1. Plato: plagiarist or victim of intellectual theft?

Accusations of plagiarism were common in the ancient world and some of these allegations involve figures who are even today central to global culture. In the fourth century BC, for example, Aristoxenus of Tarentum claimed that Plato had copied most of The Republic from the writings of the pre-Socratic philosopher Protagoras.

Conversely, another Greek philosopher, Celsus, claimed that Jesus of Nazareth had plagiarised his precepts from Plato. Celsus’s writings did not survive antiquity, but we know about his charge from a refutation penned in the third century AD by Origen of Alexandria.

These examples make it clear the ancient Greeks had a concept of intellectual property, and they used terms like “theft” and “stolen” to refer to instances of literary appropriation. Horace, for instance, described a rival as beautifying himself with “stolen plumage.”

But it was the Roman author Martial, in the first century AD, who gave literary poaching its modern name. In reference to a thieving competitor, he used the Latin term for someone who kidnaps children or slaves. This word, plagiarius, is the source of the modern term in English and other languages.

2. Dürer strikes a blow for due recognition

During the Middle Ages, the notion of intellectual ownership seems to have vanished. The authors of this period freely made use of each other’s work, either for inspiration or sometimes much more directly.

Geoffrey Chaucer, for example, drew extensively from the writings of Virgil, Ovid, Boethius, Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio for his characters, plots and themes. Shakespeare made free use of earlier writing as well, borrowing extensively from Ovid, Boccaccio, Holinshed and, ironically enough, Chaucer.

Eventually, though, the idea that an artist might have exclusive rights to their work began to reemerge across Europe. In the early 16th century, Albrecht Dürer complained to Venetian officials that an engraver, Marcantonio Raimondi, was reproducing his woodcuts. He won a partial victory. The court blocked Raimondi from using Dürer’s distinctive monogram, but allowed the Italian to keep copying the German artist’s work.

Later, the words ‘plagiarist’, ‘plagiarism’ and ‘plagiarise’ first made their appearances in English during the 17th century.

3. Cervantes has the final word

After Miguel de Cervantes published the first part of Don Quixote in 1605, he is thought to have begun work on a second story about the Man of La Mancha. Before he had completed it, however, an unauthorised sequel was published in 1614. It was written by an unknown author who used the pseudonym ‘Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda’. Avellaneda mocked Cervantes and took considerable liberties with his characters.

In response, Cervantes quickly completed his own sequel and published it the following year, in 1615. This allowed him to reclaim his narrative and to provide his own ending to the story. He also took the opportunity to poke fun at Avellaneda and to comment on deficiencies in the unauthorised work. Trying to ensure he got the last word, Cervantes even went so far as to kill off Don Quixote to prevent others from creating additional adventures for his windmill-tilting comic hero.

Read more | The Tudor law that forced an occult practice underground for centuries

4. Charles Dickens, copyright campaigner

During the 1830s, Charles Dickens began publishing his enormously popular novels in serial form. Chapters appeared, in weekly or monthly instalments, over the course of a year or more. But this publishing model provided pirates with the opportunity to rush unauthorised continuations of novels such as Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby into print before Dickens’ versions were completed.

Although Britain had a copyright law on the books, it was largely ineffective. And in countries such as the United States, where pirated editions of Dickens’ works were popular, he received no royalties from these sales.

As a result, Dickens became a champion for author’s rights. His efforts were successful in the UK, where stronger copyright protection came into effect in 1842. He also travelled to the US and encouraged copyright reform in that country, but his efforts there were less successful. American readers, it turned out, liked their cheap, pirated editions.

Dickens died in 1870 and so did not live to see the passage of an 1891 US law that finally extended copyright protection in the United States to citizens of other countries.

5. Charles Darwin and a wooden delivery

After Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, a Scottish grain merchant, Patrick Matthew, announced that he had formulated the concept of natural selection – the centrepiece of Darwin’s evolutionary theory – years earlier. In 1831, Matthew published a volume titled On Naval Timber and Arboriculture. In the work, he refers to “the natural process of selection” to explain how living things adapt to their environments.

For his part, Darwin claimed to be unfamiliar with Matthew’s book. He wrote, perhaps a little snootily, that, “One may be excused in not having discovered the fact in a work on naval timber.” But he was forced to admit that Matthew had anticipated his idea, and even its name, 28 years before his own work was published.

It is unclear whether Darwin was being entirely candid in his disavowal of any knowledge of Matthew’s idea. Historians still debate the issue. But starting with the third edition of his evolutionary treatise, he included a statement that Matthew had presented “precisely the same view on the origin of species” in a work published years before his own.

Read more | Did Charles Darwin coin the phrase 'survival of the fittest'?

6. How a Twain impersonation led to double trouble

During the 1950s and 1960s, the American actor Hal Holbrook became well known for his one-man show in which he slipped into the persona of Mark Twain. Dressed and made up to look like the famous humourist, Holbrook would dispense witticisms attributed to the author of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Holbrook won a Tony and an Emmy for his critically acclaimed impersonation.

A few years later, a young actor named Mike Randall began to perform his own stage show, which also involved impersonating Mark Twain. Holbrook promptly sued Randall, alleging the other man was copying his routine. The two eventually reached a settlement, leaving Randall free to continue with his performances.

This case underscores how difficult it can be to determine what is appropriation and what is not. Randall had no choice but to dress and sound like the humourist, otherwise his routine would not have been seen as authentic. And the degree to which Randall’s interpretation bore a similarity to Holbrook’s is ultimately subjective.

Twain himself, you suspect, would have had huge fun commenting on what happened had reports of his death not been at all exaggerated.

7. Mountweazely words

During the 20th century, the editors of encyclopaedias and dictionaries began to include made-up entries in their wares as a check on whether their works were being plagiarised.

The 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia contained a short biographical listing for ‘Lillian Mountweazel’, a photographer who tragically died in an explosion when she was only 31. But no such person ever existed. The entry was solely included to provide evidence of piracy, should it later appear in another encyclopaedia. This entry became famous enough that copyright traps are often called ‘mountweazels’.

However, these traps don’t always work. In 1991, the US Supreme Court heard a case in which the plaintiff, a compiler of telephone directories, had included fake phone numbers in their listings. When these numbers turned up in a rival’s directory, the plaintiff sued, with the made-up digits offered as evidence of the infringement. The court, however, ruled for the defendants on the grounds that numbers in a directory could not be copyrighted as they did not demonstrate a minimum level of creativity.

8. Novel problems

In some cases, what appears to be plagiarism is the result of authors using the same source material. In 2001, Norwegian author Tom Egeland published a thriller that included details such as a world-wide conspiracy, a secret society, a character with albinism, and the claim that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married. Two years later, Dan Brown published The Da Vinci Code, a work that contains these same details.

Brown claimed to know nothing about Egeland’s novel, which wasn’t translated into English until several years later. The coincidences seem to be the result of both authors making use of an earlier book, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, published in 1982.

A similar set of coincidences bedevilled William Golding. On the eve of receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983, he was accused of plagiarising from the 1926 novel Children of the Morning for his Lord of the Flies, which appeared in 1954. Certainly, both works contain striking similarities, such as marooned children, a red-headed main character and rescue by a military vessel.

Golding denied having ever read the earlier novel. He allegedly argued that “there are a great many books in the world about a great many islands written by a great many authors”.

Read more | What inspired the darkness of Lord of the Flies? The disturbing history behind the novel

9. A delicate balancing act

In 1988, a graduate student discovered that Shervert Frazier, a faculty member of the Harvard Medical School, committed plagiarism in four papers he published during the 1960s and 1970s. Frazier claimed the appropriations were unintentional but was forced to resign his professorship. Some members of the academic community believed the punishment was disproportionate.

This episode – one of the highest profile cases of academic plagiarism to date – reveals the difficult position that colleges find themselves in when it comes to such misconduct. On the one hand, universities are disincentivised from accusing their own staff of plagiarism because such episodes can tarnish the reputation of their institutions. But they are also expected to enforce penalties for academic misconduct by students, which can include expulsion if multiple instances are discovered.

10. Cases of doctoral doctoring?

During the 2010s, four members of German chancellor Angela Merkel’s cabinet were accused of plagiarising parts of their doctoral dissertations. Three of these ministers – Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, Annette Schavan, and Franziska Giffey – resigned their positions as a result. Following an investigation, a fourth, Ursula van der Leyen, was cleared of misconduct and able to keep her degree and her appointment. She has gone on to serve as the president of the European Commission.

More generally, it is unclear to what degree the German public viewed these transgressions as especially serious. Although Giffey had her doctorate revoked by the Free University of Berlin and stepped down from Merkel’s cabinet, she was elected four months later as governing mayor of Berlin, a position she held until 2023.

11. Franchises and fanfic furores

Fans of many popular franchises, such as Harry Potter, The Hunger Games and the Twilight series, have used these fictional worlds as a basis for creating their own stories – the world of ‘fanfic’. The publication of such narratives is largely prohibited by the original creators’ copyrights, but literally millions of such tales can be found in online archives and repositories.

Some authors take a relatively benign attitude towards their fans’ creations. A few, such as the late Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek, have actually encouraged fans to write new stories. Many others, however, are vocal in their opposition. Writers in this camp include the late Anne Rice (Interview with the Vampire) and George RR Martin (Game of Thrones). Diana Gabalon has even said that she feels nauseous whenever she comes across fan fiction making use of material from her Outlander series.

Meantime, the legality of fanfic has been hotly debated. Parodies, for example, may avoid censure as a specific defence under certain copyright laws.

12. Tony Blair's cinematic 'recall'

In 2010, Tony Blair published A Journey: My Political Life. The memoir included an account of his first meeting with Queen Elizabeth. Blair recalled that the Queen made a puckish observation on that occasion: “You are my 10th prime minister. The first was Winston. That was before you were born”. It’s a good line – and very similar to one that had appeared in the 2006 movie The Queen, written by Peter Morgan. Blair insists this happened and dismissed any allegations of plagiarism, saying he had not seen the film.

Whilst Morgan indicated that Blair might have confused reality with the film, Blair suggested that it was a story he had told so often that perhaps someone else had told it to Morgan ahead of the film. The episode provides a good example of how we can incorporate information into our memories without being aware of its source, a process that makes many of us inadvertent plagiarists.

Roger Kreuz is an associate dean and professor of psychology at the University of Memphis. He is the author of Strikingly Similar: Plagiarism and Appropriation from Chaucer to Chatbots (Cambridge University Press, 2026)

Pipelines and Petro Politics - Charlie Angus / The Resistance

2026-06-07T12:01:50.000Z

From the moment Donald Trump started threatening Canada’s economy and sovereignty, Premier Danielle Smith was an outlier.

She refused to be part of the Team Canada approach, preferring instead to head to Mar-a-Lago with Jordan Peterson and Kevin O’Leary.

Peterson had just quit Canada, claiming it had become a “totalitarian hellhole.”1 O’Leary was all over American media promoting the idea of Canada joining the United States.2

Smith later held a major public event with MAGA spokesman Tucker Carlson, who has suggested regime change for Canada. Then, as Trump amped up his rhetoric about moving the border, she returned to the United States in March 2025 to appear along side MAGA influencer Ben Shapiro.

Shapiro ridiculed Canada, calling us a “silly country”, bragging about an invasion and balked at giving Canadians the right to vote if we became part of the United States.

He said Canada should be treated like Puerto Rico.3

As other premiers attempted to bury their political differences and show solidarity with the Carney government, Smith fanned the flames of regional alienation, claiming that the federal Liberals were attacking Alberta’s oil and gas interests.

In a petro state such as Canada, this was an easy pitch.

The media love the narrative that Liberal Ottawa is the enemy of hardworking oil workers. Such coverage never mentions that under the Trudeau Liberals, oil production almost doubled over what it had been under the Harper government.

Thanks to the government’s decision to build the TMX pipeline, oil production was boosted from 2.9 million barrels a day to 5 million barrels.

There was no business case for a private-sector plan to build the pipeline, so the public paid for it. The price tag came in at a staggering $34 billion, which worked out to a subsidy of $850 per taxpayer in the country.4

The plan was to have the oil companies pay back the cost through tolls on every barrel shipped, but it ran into trouble when the oil giants balked at paying the real price required to make the pipeline pay for itself.

Rather than be stuck with an empty pipeline, public money was used to subsidize the oil giants. This amounted to about 50 cents on the dollar for every barrel, a potential $18 billion giveaway that would cost $1248 per household.5

With such staggering cost overruns, building another pipeline was out of the question. This wasn’t a problem for the oil companies. Production was up, and profits were at an all-time high.

Trudeau’s huge gift to the oil industry brought him no political benefit. He was demonized by the right wing. Alberta politicians treated him as an existential threat to the West. It was a falsehood casually picked up and repeated across Canada’s punditry class – Liberals being mean to Alberta.

Trudeau also had a problem with his environmental base. He had made firm commitments on reducing emissions at the Paris climate accord talks in 2015.

The Paris Treaty was seen by climate scientists as a last-ditched effort to avert climate catastrophe. Over 200 countries signed the agreement to dramatically reduce emissions in an effort to stop the planet from breaking through the dangerous 1.5 degree Celsius increase that would plunge the country into a climate catastrophe.

The United Nations warned that there was, at most, a dozen years to turn things around before the world plunged into a permanently unstable climate.6

Averting this existential threat required a global commitment to meet Net Zero targets for the environment by 2050. The TMX pipeline blew Canada’s commitment out of the water. But even without the pipeline, the targets were questionable because, as other sectors worked to cut emissions, the oil patch had increased GHG emissions by 76% since 1990.7 Even higher emissions were on the horizon thanks to TMX.

Environment Commissioner Gerry DeMarco was frustrated that Canada continued to miss the targets it had set to address emissions.

“Canada was once a leader in the fight against climate change,” he stated. “However, it has become the worst performer of all G7 countries since the landmark Paris agreement on climate change was adopted in 2015.”

I cross-examined Mr. DeMarco at a parliamentary committee in 2022 and asked him to explain. He was blunt:

“How bad has it been? Well, since Paris, we’ve had an increase in emissions, and the other six G7 nations are doing better than we are. It’s not just since Paris, though. Since Rio in 1992, Canada has been the worst performer of the G7… while most of the emissions of the G7 countries have gone down, and a couple of the countries are around the same as they were in 1990. We’re up by 20%. That’s a significant outlier compared to the rest of the G7.”8

In an attempt to reduce emissions, the Trudeau government established a series of targets backed by regulatory levers. But these efforts only made Prime Minister Trudeau more of an enemy of the Smith government.

With Trump issuing threats on the border, Smith saw a clear opportunity to intimidate the incoming Carney government. She launched a full-on war with Ottawa. She put forward a list of non-negotiable demands, including a new pipeline and stripping the regulations in place so that Canada might meet its global obligations.

Smith dangled the threat of “alienation” as the separatist movement was becoming increasingly militant.

Mark Carney was widely seen as the man with the skills to stick-handle this potential crisis. He had served as the UN’s Special Envoy on climate action and finance. He had a global reputation as the “green banker” for putting forward the clear economic case of shifting investments to ensure a sustainable future.

Carney understood the financial necessity of diversification and the future that would unfold if we failed. The International Energy Agency (IEA) had also issued a series of reports urging countries to shift away from fossil-fuel infrastructure, lest they become stranded assets, as the world was shifting towards a green investment future, Carney had been predicting.

But Trump and MAGA were waging an ideological war on renewables and sustainable energy. This made them natural allies to the hugely powerful Alberta oil lobby. The Prime Minister attempted to blunt this foreign pressure by stating his willingness to build another pipeline to the coast, which would vastly increase production.

The pipeline plan caught the British Columbia government of David Eby flat-footed and angered Indigenous nations on the pipeline route over the failure to consult.

Many observers assumed that the Prime Minister was using the promise of a pipeline to bring Danielle Smith into the federal fold. After all, there was still no credible financial case to build another pipeline.9 In exchange, he would extract strong commitments from Alberta on dealing with emissions and pollution.

As a strategy, it made some sense.

But that’s not how it played.

As a sign of his good faith, the Prime Minister cut the unpopular consumer carbon tax. Carney then agreed to renegotiate the industrial carbon tax on polluters. This was the key tool for ensuring the massively profitable oil giants reinvested to reduce emissions. Carney dropped the federal regulations and allowed the oil industry to follow the much lower Alberta standard.

Industry was elated. They bragged that this change would save them $250 billion in costs in the coming years. The impacts on the Net Zero commitments were recognized immediately.

Chris Severson-Baker of the Pembina Institute said that by lowballing the obligation on the industrial carbon price, Canada’s Net Zero plan was now unattainable and would actually lead to increasing emissions in the coming decades.

“Pushing the $130 price by 15 years means there will be no effective action to reduce oil sands emissions for a generation. This decision guarantees that oil sands emissions — which reached an all-time high in 2025 — will continue to rise year over year for at least another 15 years.”10

Carney took the same approach when dealing with methane emissions. Methane is a planet killer with impacts 85 times higher than Co2. Industry had received hundreds of millions in grants to clean up methane emissions with very few measurable results.

The federal regulations had been seen as a means of finally getting them under control. The Carney government, in another show of good faith to Smith, turned the methane file over to the Alberta Energy Regulator.

The Pembina Institute analysis was withering – on every key standard, the provincial regs set lower standards with non-binding obligations.

“The Province’s regulations are patently weaker than the federal government’s in every respect,” they reported.11

The regulator had a brutal record of underreporting emissions, leaks and pollution from the industry. A 2024 study found that the actual emissions coming from the Alberta tar sands were 6300 times higher than the official reports.12

On top of all this, Smith scored another victory from Carney by getting him to pause the clean energy regulations, which had been put in place to phase out fossil burning on Canada’s electricity grid.

The cost of these compromises to the Prime Minister was the loss of a popular Quebec lieutenant, Steven Guilbeault, who quit cabinet and then resigned his seat. Fourteen other Liberal MPs sent a letter stating their concerns that the PM was abandoning Canada’s international climate commitments.

It also totally stalled Canada’s tepid steps towards addressing the climate crisis and pushed us backwards.

Was this the price to be paid to shut down the separatist threat?

It didn’t seem to work out that way. When Smith brought the promise of a new pipeline to her party convention, she was loudly booed.13 Her extremist supporters didn’t want Canada to work. They weren’t interested in the jobs. They wanted conflict.

To placate this base, she opened the doors for a referendum to break up the country.

People in Alberta did their best to push back against Smith’s reckless action. Thomas Luckaszk, a former Progressive Conservative cabinet minister, led a huge petition drive to keep Alberta in Canada. The threshold for getting this petition to a vote was 10% of the electorate. The Forever Campaign easily exceeded this. But the government put the pro-Canada initiative on the shelf.

When the separatists came forward with their own referendum, Premier Smith changed the rules and dropped the threshold to 5%.

That referendum was challenged by a provincial court as unconstitutional. Smith then overrode the court and allowed a second petition. The petition was blocked by another court after Indigenous nations intervened under Treaties 7 and 8. They successfully argued that the government had failed to fulfill its duty to consult.

Smith then pushed a new petition with vaguer wording on whether there should be a petition to break up the country.

It was, in effect, another referendum on leaving Canada.

Within no time at all, the online world was awash with foreign BOT sites claiming to be Alberta “liberty” and “separatist” pages. In May 2026, it was reported that the Russian Internet Research Agency, which had played such a devastatingly effective role in interfering in Brexit and the Trump election of 2016, was actively promoting the breakup of Canada.14

Then, Elections Alberta provided the entire electoral list of all citizens to the Republican Party of Alberta. The names, phone numbers and addresses of every voter were then leaked. It was a massive breach of privacy, and conspiracy groups were using APPs to track people on the list.

The Brexit playbook was now in action. And all the dark players had arrived, determined to break up our country.

Canadian media pundits have tended to treat the referendum as a spat between alienated westerners and the federal government. The role of the United States and dark offshore actors requires serious investigation.

As for Canada’s Net Zero commitments?

Whether a new pipeline is built or not, the country has walked away from its global obligations to play its part in reducing the devastating impacts of fossil fuel emissions from one of the most toxic sites on the planet.

The narrow window we had in Paris has almost closed.

Canada has shown incredible spirit and determination in the face of the Trump threat, but Danielle Smith has set the stage for us to sleepwalk towards a Donbas-style crisis or a climate catastrophe.

Does all of this leave you feeling overwhelmed? Defeated? Don’t be. The oil lobby is massively powerful in Canada, but the voice of the people matters.

The Prime Minister has announced that, because of your activism, he is rethinking some of his positions on pushing past environmental and First Nations concerns.

This is a huge win for people power.

Since launching The Resistance, some have told me I need to be more of a cheerleader and not question the Prime Minister. But that is not how democracy works.

The lobbyists have enormous access in the corridors of power. We have our voices and the right, as citizens, to call our MPs and the PM.

We keep kicking at the darkness, and it just might bleed daylight.

If any photos or images on this site are under copyright, please let us know and we will provide appropriate credit. This content is used in accordance with applicable copyright laws, including “fair dealing” under Canadian law and “fair use” under Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act, for purposes such as criticism, comment, and news reporting.

This post is public — feel free to share it.

Jordan Peterson says he’s left Canada and moved to the United States. December 13, 2024.

‘Shark Tank’ star Kevin O’Leary supports Trump’s idea of Canada becoming 51st US state: ‘Potential is massive.’ Fox Business. December 27, 2025.

Alberta premier stands by plan to speak at U.S. fundraiser despite calls to cancel. CBC. March 26, 2025.

You paid $850 for the Transmountain pipeline. Here’s why. CBC the National. May 17, 2024.

Canadians are still paying for the Trans Mountain pipeline. De Smog. October 1, 2024.

We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe, warns UN. The Guardian. October 8, 2018.

Greenhouse gas emissions. Government of Canada. https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services/environmental-indicators/greenhouse-gas-emissions.html

Gerry Demarco testimony. Standing Committee on Natural Resources. January 31, 2022.

Experts pan economic case for pipeline, argues Venezuela impact unlikely. The Chilliwack Progress. January 9, 2026.

Weakened industrial carbon price harms Canada’s economic future, abandons international commitments. Pembina Institute. May 15, 2026.

Alberta falls short of expectations on methane regulations. Pembina Institute. April 28, 2026.

Canadian tar sands pollution is 6300 times higher than reported study finds. The Guardian. Jan 25, 2024.

Pipeline deal with Ottawa met with boos at UCP convention. Canadian Press. November 28, 2025.

Russia and U.S. amplifying Alberta Separatist Narratives. Radio Canada. May 7, 2026.

Churchill’s evolving perspective on D-Day - HistoryExtra

2026-06-06T21:10:54.000Z

D-Day was one of the key episodes in the Second World War. But what did Winston Churchill make of the plans for the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied France? Was, as some have suggested, the British prime minister really reluctant to get involved? And how fraught were relationships between the Allied leaders?

Speaking to Matt Elton on the HistoryExtra podcast, Richard Dannatt and Allen Packwood, authors of the book Churchill’s D-Day: The Inside Story, discuss the decisions and tensions behind the operation.

What context do we need to understand about Churchill – and Britain – in the early years of the Second World War to make sense of what was to happen in the run up to D-Day?

Richard Dannatt: The first thing to consider is the circumstances of how Churchill became prime minister in May 1940. He had recently been present at a parliamentary debate to defend a disastrous campaign in Norway that had taken place in the months beforehand. It had been Churchill’s idea to try and hobble German industry by cutting off the supply of iron ore from Sweden through Norway into Germany – and it had been a disaster. Everything you can think of that could go wrong, had gone wrong – and it’s one of the illustrated examples that we use in the British Army staff college about how not to conduct an operation. This – among other things – would continue to play on Churchill’s mind.

Read more | Winston Churchill: is he still the greatest Briton in history?

Allen Packwood: We must remember that Churchill is not elected prime minister in May 1940. He is there, really, because of a Westminster coup to remove Neville Chamberlain.

Churchill then had to construct a national coalition government, which meant he had to put together a war cabinet containing people who – until recently – had been his rivals or political opponents. This meant he did not enter the war as prime minister in a strong position – and he had to consider carefully how he was going to respond to that.

We then had the Dunkirk evacuation, and Churchill very famously said that wars are not won by evacuations. But it must have been very clear to him – in 1940 – that the road was going to be a very long, hard one before Britain could return to France.

One of the things that has often been said to have influenced Churchill’s approach to D-Day is his experience in the First World War, specifically the Dardanelles campaign (1915–16). Do you think this is overstated?

RD: I think the Dardanelles campaign had a major impact on Churchill. He was First Lord of the Admiralty at the time, and he had come up with the campaign’s concept, which was a bold attempt to try and break the deadlock of the extended trench warfare on the Western Front. You must give him marks for trying to find a new initiative, but – and this is the sadness – although the strategic thinking might have been reasonable, the operational delivery was woeful.

There was also a huge loss of life in the Dardanelles campaign. This, in addition to the Norway campaign, sat heavily on Churchill’s mind in the run up to D-Day. I think it played very much into his overall thinking.

AP: The lesson that he took away from Dardanelles was that if you were going to attempt an operation of this scale and complexity then you needed to do it very carefully – and at the right time. You needed to make sure that you had control of all the moving parts, politically and militarily.

We tend to think of Churchill as this bellicose war leader, but actually he was keen to avoid the huge losses of life that had occurred in the First World War. This certainly influenced his strategy and thinking when it came to D-Day.

To what extent is it right to say that Churchill was sceptical of D-Day?

RD: Churchill knew at some stage that there needed to be re-entry into Europe, but he was very keen on it not being premature. So on the one hand, he was sceptical. But on the other hand, he knew it was inevitable. The big thing was to get the timing and preparation right.

AP: This idea of Churchill being sceptical about D-Day developed quite quickly after the end of the Second World War. Eisenhower, when he published his memoirs, described how at one of the big conferences in May 1944, just before D-Day, Churchill had told the gathering that he was hardening on this enterprise, which the Americans immediately took to mean that he had been soft on it up until that point.

This view has been taken up more recently in popular culture by the movie Churchill (2017). The film starts with Churchill walking on a British beach and recoiling as he has a vision of the sea running red with blood. The implication is that history is going to repeat itself; it’s going be the Dardanelles campaign all over again. The movie then proceeds to show Churchill attempting to obstruct the operation with 48 hours to go – which of course was not the case.

Read more | Churchill: the ‘cry-baby’ war hero

Churchill was also keenly aware of this idea that he was sceptical of D-Day – and he tried to respond to it in his own war memoirs. The key point is that he always knew we were going to have to go back into France, but he knew it should only be contemplated at the right moment when all the necessary preconditions have been met (so when we had the tactical experience, expertise, strategy and equipment required for what was going to be an incredibly difficult operation).

Do we know what Churchill felt about D-Day in the run up to the day itself?

RD: I think once Churchill had agreed in his own mind that it was going to happen, then he was determined that the operation should be given the best chance of success. He leveraged his convening power as prime minister to make sure that all these different elements were in place – from technical innovations… to planning… to even putting a lockdown in place in the south of England to maintain the security of the operation.

But we know that Churchill had doubts and fears about D-Day. Hence the remark to his wife, Clemmie, the night before, in which he mentioned the possibility of enormous casualties.

AP: Another of Churchill’s big concerns in the weeks running up to D-Day was the risk of French civilian casualties.

The bombing scheme that Eisenhower and the military commanders had settled on was one that targeted the French railway system and marshalling yards. These tended to be in areas of high civilian population density.

Churchill raised this issue multiple times with the defence committee and the war cabinet. He raised it with Eisenhower and President Roosevelt. His fear was that if the French take these very large casualties, then this might turn them against the Allies.

He was also thinking of the political ramifications of this course of action, which are that in the postwar world, this might drive a wedge between Britain and France. Ultimately, of course, he didn’t overrule the military commanders, but he did everything he could to try and limit the effect of that bombing on French civilians.

What did Churchill do on 6 June itself?

AP: Churchill was in Downing Street in the Treasury Annex on the morning of D-Day, poring over the latest maps and charts and receiving the latest reports on what’s happening on the beaches. At 12 noon, he moved to the House of Commons to make his first statement. At that point, there was not much he could say; the operation was still shrouded in the fog of war and it was not clear how it was developing. So Churchill left to have lunch with the king, and then visited some of the headquarters on the outskirts of London before coming back and reporting to parliament. The really interesting fact, of course, is that this was not where Churchill wanted to be at all – he wanted to be in the centre of the action itself and had tried unsuccessfully to get himself on board a British cruiser.

What were the repercussions of D-Day? How did it affect Churchill’s relationship with, for example, the US?

RD: Churchill began to realise – once the operations ashore were fully developed – that this was now the beginning of an inevitable switch from British influence to American influence. This meant that his ability to influence subsequent military strategy and higher-level operational objectives were no longer in his control. It was no longer solely a British operation. It was a realisation that the British position was changing and that the Americans’ position of supremacy was frankly becoming a reality.

Tim Benbow at King’s College London has written that the D-Day landings showed Churchill at his best and at his worst. Is this a view that you have sympathy with?

AP: This is probably a view that I would have some sympathy with.

I think one of the things that Churchill did well – but isn’t often credited for – is the political work that he did behind the scenes in maintaining the national coalition. In the months before D-Day, he spent a lot of time preparing the country for this huge operation using the convening power of the prime minister to knock heads together, to ensure that production targets are met, to ensure that the artificial harbours needed for the operation are being built, to ensure that the right equipment and tanks are in place.

I suppose the worst of Churchill might be a certain sort of selfishness and stubbornness, which was certainly evidenced in his insistence that he wanted to accompany the troops across the channel, even though that was clearly not where he should be. I think he found the months leading up to D-Day personally very difficult because he was one of those people who liked to be at the centre of the action.

I think he also found it difficult to accept the transition to secondary status in the Anglo-American relationship.

How would you like people to understand D-Day and Churchill’s role within it?

RD: I think Churchill’s role in D-Day illustrates most effectively Britain’s role in D-Day and Britain’s role in the new Europe that was created at the end of the Second World War. Let’s face it, if D-Day had failed – and if we had not been able to defeat Nazi Germany and some kind of pact had been formed between Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union – Europe would have looked a very different place today.

Read more | Why Churchill’s reputation is still on the line

AP: For me, it’s all about complexity and nuance. Too often when we talk about Churchill, we tend to just see that famous image of Churchill as the ‘bulldog warrior’ with his V for Victory salute and a cigar. We think of his speeches. But Churchill was an incredibly complex character; the decisions that he – and others – were taking were incredibly difficult and it’s impossible to know if they got it right. In many of these decisions, there was not one right answer, just some incredibly tough choices.

But I think if you want to understand the world that we inhabit today – and the Europe that we inhabit today – then you must understand the decisions that underpin this and got us to where we are now.

Allen Packwood is director of the Churchill Archives Centre at Churchill College in Cambridge

Richard Dannatt is former Chief of the General Staff and member of the House of Lords

This interview, originally published in 2024, was taken from an episode of the HistoryExtra podcast: D-Day: was Churchill really against the operation?

The women’s work that made D-Day a success - HistoryExtra

2026-06-06T00:10:00.000Z

“I was sent with a team of other Wren officers, to a strange secret hideout in the cellars of the old Barclays hotel, where we sat down in front of huge sheets of statistics, with columns and columns of figures,” former WRNS meteorologist Paulina Nichol recalled. “And all we had to do was add the figures up.”

Nichol was talking about a particular assignment covered by the Official Secrets Act; the plan for when the invasion of Normandy, known as D-Day, would take place. Women, she says, were used “as calculators”, just one of the vital ways that women’s labour shaped the events of 1944 and beyond.

The enormous degree of planning and detailed work that made Operation Overlord and the subsequent battle for Normandy a success is rightly well-remembered, and D-Day is widely commemorated each year. Perhaps less often foregrounded is the role of women, who were involved at almost every level of the operation well before 6 June 1944 – whether as members of the Allied military services or as civilians.

More than 80 years on, it is worth delving a little deeper into the varied ways that women took part.

The women who planned D-Day

RAF Medmenham in Buckinghamshire was home to the RAF’s Central Interpretation Unit. Using photographs from reconnaissance missions, the unit constructed three-dimensional images of key targets. Between 1941 and 1944, the staff grew from 231 to over 1,700, going on to provide key intelligence reports and monitoring the railways around the Normandy area to assess the impact of bombing raids, in a bid to delay German reinforcements.

Read more | D-Day: the spearhead of the invasion

The Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) undertook many roles at Medmenham, one being photographic interpreters, who included in their ranks Sarah Oliver – the daughter of Prime Minister Winston Churchill – and Mary Harrison, who crafted physical models of major targets, including the Normandy beaches. Precision was essential, using photographs and maps to recreate every contour and building accurately with papier mâché, plaster of Paris and lino. Mary explained: “You looked for guns and artillery and defence and they were marked usually in red… all the time you were looking for things… that the army or the landing troops could look for.”

This three-dimensional view of the beaches allowed military staff to visualise the landing site, identify landmarks and strategic goals, assess potential enemy strong-points, and plan their progress inland.

The women who trained for D-Day

When preparing to land on the beaches of Normandy, the troops had to practise with the landing craft, and training exercises were timed to the second. Margaret Seeley of the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS, and officially known as the Wrens), was stationed at the signals office, HMS Squid in Southampton.

She described her role in a major exercise: “I had to cancel my leave, and I was told to go down to the Hard, which is down in the harbour, and it was the only time in the war I had to wear my tin hat.

“We had to look out the window and see every landing craft that came in, note its exact time, how long it took to load and when it sailed. And then report this over the phone back to head office,” she said. There’s a sense of their work as being essential. “I was told that when the actual thing happened, I would be able to do this job and I was thrilled.”

To Margaret’s disappointment, though, when the time came for invasion, she wouldn’t get any closer to the operation. “Towards the end of the exercise they decided it wasn’t the place for women, so I had to hand over to a naval rating, who was a young lad.

“He didn’t even know how to use a telephone and I had to show him how to do this job. I was rather disappointed, but, you know, one just obeyed orders and that was it.”

The women who prepared the landings at D-Day

After the initial invasion and once the Allies had formed a bridgehead into Normandy, gaining important territory, they installed artificial ‘Mulberry Harbours’, temporary portable harbours that allowed more troops and equipment to arrive.

Ahead of D-Day, Elizabeth Rowell was one of the many factory workers manufacturing different components of the harbours. Working in Sunderland, her job was to splice ropes. It was heavy, dirty manual work. Groups of eight women stood in a circle, winding wire coils, over and under around a cable base. They would then insert hooks and thimbles (rings) at either end. These heavy wire cables were then used to hold the Mulberry Harbours together, although many of the factory workers didn’t know this until after the war.

The woman who chose the date of D-Day

D-Day was initially earmarked for May 1944 – and meteorologists were tasked with selecting the best exact date, tracking the moon, tides and the most unpredictable element, the weather.

Wren Officer Paulina Nichol, a meteorologist, explained how it worked: “They were constantly trying to discover how best to choose the day for invasion. And this was to do with phases of the moon, it was some slightly crack-pot theory.

“This being before the days of calculators, they used us as calculators.”

Ultimately, 5 June 1944 was selected for D-Day, but with just 36 hours to go, Maureen Flavin, an Irish postal clerk in County Mayo, was the first to forecast a storm approaching from the Atlantic. As a result, D-Day was pushed back 24 hours until the weather was sufficiently improved.

The woman who fooled the Germans

To confuse the Germans, the Allies created ‘windows’ where RAF planes dropped strips of metal foil over the English Channel. This fooled German radar by giving the false impression that a large Allied fleet was sailing for the Pas de Calais area of northern France.

This technique had been devised by Joan Curran, a Welsh physicist who had been a PhD student when the war broke out.

The women codebreakers

Bletchley Park in Milton Keynes was home to Britain’s codebreakers, and over three-quarters of the staff were women.

Intercepting transmissions and breaking codes, the staff at Bletchley gathered information on enemy movements, monitoring whether deception tactics were working, and whether the Germans anticipated the Allied invasion. After 6 June, Bletchley relayed information about German counter-attacks.

The women intelligence agents

Special Operations Executive (SOE, established in 1940) deployed both male and female agents in occupied Europe, to gather intelligence and galvanise the local resistance.

Gradually, SOE occupied several buildings on Baker Street in London, with Colonel Maurice Buckmaster leading ‘F section’, overseeing agents in France. Many of the Baker Street staff were female.

Odette Brown, an officer with the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry described her role as secretary: “One of the things I did… was type out the personal messages that went out on the BBC radio, and especially the D-Day messages. I knew them by heart, which message applied to which circuit. There were two lots of messages, there were ‘A messages’ and ‘B messages’.

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Brown’s messages relayed crucial information across the network, she explained. “Now the agents had been warned as D-Day approached, they had to listen to the BBC on the 1^st and 15^th of every month and that if they heard the A messages, then they knew the invasion would happen within the next two weeks. So, then they had to listen daily until they heard the B message, which meant the invasion would start the next day.”

SOE agent Lise de Baissac was in her hometown of Paris when she heard the BBC broadcast. Lise had fled the German invasion, eventually arriving in London in 1941 and was recruited by SOE in May 1942. Four months later, she parachuted into occupied France and worked as a courier for her brother Claude’s network in Bordeaux, before setting up her own network in Poitiers. After a period back in England as a liaison officer training other SOE agents, Lise returned to France in April 1944 to support her brother’s new network in Normandy. “There were groups of Maquis (French resistance) and I had to pass on orders from one to the other. What my brother couldn’t do for himself, I did for him.”

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Recruiting in Paris when she heard the BBC broadcast, Lise raced back to Normandy, avoiding large German military formations. For the next three months, Lise and Claude’s network sabotaged German reinforcements and sent critical intelligence reports to the Allies.

The women who oversaw the operation

Before the days of computers, the WAAF at Fighter Command HQ at RAF Bentley Priory plotted out air force positions in real time on a large map. Overlaid with a grid, the map extended from the South of England across the Channel to the Normandy coastline. On the eve of D-Day, plotter Joan Seaman recalls how the map table was suddenly transformed:

“On the table, we plotted convoys, just a circle of card with the convoy name on it… That was all the ships going over. There was so much… the whole plotting table was just a complete mass of coloured arrows, a complete mass of it.”

As the invasion began, the female plotters marked out the Allied positions. It was fast and frantic work, but Joan remembers it as “extremely exciting… to give a complete picture of everything that was going on around the shores of the British Isles”.

Elsewhere, General Dwight D Eisenhower oversaw the Allied Invasion from Southwick House near Portsmouth.

Deep underground there, Wren Marie Scott was a radio operator, alongside other women from the WRNS, the WAAF and Auxiliary Territorial Service.

On landing day, Marie was relaying messages directly to the men on the beaches. To her alarm, the sounds of warfare filled her ears. “In my earphones, I was on the beaches of Normandy, I heard everything… Machine gun fire, cannon fire, bombs, men shouting orders, men screaming… it was the chaos of war.”

With no conflict training, the female radio operators had no preparation for this, but they had no option but to continue their work.

The women nurses of D-Day

Some of the first women to arrive in Normandy after the landings were military nurses. Amy Dunnett served with No 3 Casualty Clearing Station.

Taken out on a landing craft, Dunnett recalls nurses scrambling down the nets, wearing heavy army boots and tin hats, packs on their backs, landing on Gold Beach in mid-June. They went to a tented hospital in a field full of tall grass and flowers. “It was very primitive”, but they had to make do as casualties came in thick and fast. “I worked in the operating theatres, on one occasion working for 56 hours without a break.”

The women of D-Day, both military and civilian, played a crucial role in the Allied victory. Their tireless work contributed to the success of Operation Overlord and helped pave the way for the liberation of Europe.

Elisabeth Shipton is a military historian, television and radio documentary researcher, and author. Her books include Female Tommies: The Frontline Women of the First World War (The History Press, 2014)