It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a woman in possession of a love of history, must be in want of a blog.
Coming across a compilation of University of Oxford women's exam papers from the 1870s and 80s was something of a treat for me. Having studied History and German at Oxford from 2011-2015, I was eager to find out how the exam papers from 130 years ago differed from those now. Imagine, then, my horror when I …
Regular readers may have noticed that my posts have been thin on the ground during the past academic year. This is because I was preparing for my Finals exams at Oxford and had lamentably little time for extra-curricular history, as it were. I finished Finals in June, but the intervening time has been a whirlwind of …
There seems to be something inherently social about drinking coffee. We ask people to come in for a cup of tea, but we go out for coffee with friends, family and colleagues. This isn't a modern phenomenon; coffee has always been intimately connected with sociability. In North Africa and the Middle East, coffee-houses had been …
Continue reading The rise and fall of the English coffee-house