Introduction from Professor P. Cane and Dr H. Kumarasingham, Editors of The Cambridge Constitutional History of the United Kingdom On 6 March 2024, The Cambridge Constitutional History of the United Kingdom was launched in the House of Lords. This is the first publication of its kind and the culmination of over 7 years of work, consisting of 2 volumes, 42 chapters, 40 authors and over 1000 pages. The multi-disciplinary intellectual contribution and expansive range on offer are what makes these volumes a distinctive and important resource to comprehend not just the United Kingdom’s constitution ..read more

When going to my hospital work, I pass a well-kept peaceful and quite large grass area surrounded by a fence. A memory stone declares that this is a mass grave of cholera victims from the 1850s. As a researcher in fluid balance, I sometimes think about how little doctors knew about this topic 175 years ago. Sadly, these deaths were preventable. Moreover, a religious detail did add to the tragedy. In those days, the hospital area was situated outside the city, which means that the victims were not buried in “sacred soil” close to the church. For good, times have changed. Today we know a lot mo ..read more

I have described writing my forthcoming book as something I needed to do, almost like an itch that needed to be scratched.   But now that it is finished, I have very mixed feelings about its imminent publication.  The bravery and the enthusiasm project have long since evaporated and replaced by a combination of nerves and reticence.  There are the usual reasons for this.  The book is a long time with me, a big investment of time, so like any author I am keen that it lands well.  And of course it isn’t just the time I have spent writing. I have spent a career study ..read more

Polls are already big news – and they’ll only get bigger as we doom scroll our way through another appalling election cycle.  Is Trump really up in Michigan? Is Biden really hemorrhaging support among young people? For all the attention we pay to polls, it is crazy how little we actually know about how they work.  Back in the day we knew a lot: if you get answers from a random sample of the population, you’ll get unbiased estimates that get more accurate as the sample size goes up.  But now?  The New York Times may contact a random sample, but only 1 in 100 answer.  A ..read more

William Faulkner at his home in Oxford, Mississippi, ca. 1932 In 2016, a handmade booklet of drawings and poems turned up on an episode of Antiques Roadshow from Little Rock, Arkansas. The man who owned the piece described it as “a book of poems by William Faulkner,” and appraiser Ian Ehling, now Director of Fine Books and Manuscripts for Bonhams New York, confirmed its authenticity. The owner explained that it was a gift from Faulkner to a family friend who died in the 1980s and had briefly dated the author around 1920. Indeed, Faulkner during this time made several such books in the art nouv ..read more

One of the most common explanations for our divided world is that we are all very different from each other, and that getting along is thus correspondingly difficult.  The world is a very diverse place, we tell ourselves, so agreements are difficult to come by.  The best we can do is to keep the communication channels open, to try to include everyone in the discussion, and to try to respect other people’s opinions.  This position is emblematic of classical liberalism, the political ideology that undergirds our democratic systems.  Liberal democracy is invested in a series o ..read more

President Donald J. Trump is greeted by Kim Jong Un, Chairman of the State Affairs Commission of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2019, at the Sofitel Legend Metropole hotel in Hanoi, for their second summit meeting. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead) “Not as bad as we might have feared; not as good as we might have hoped” is one way to think of the four years in which Donald Trump put his uniquely Trumpian spin on US-Korean relations. And lest we forget, there was reason to be afraid as President Trump taunted the young leader of a notoriously prick ..read more

In late 2022, BMW began manufacturing their new hybrid SUV, the XM. The German automaker had unveiled the vehicle in concept form a year earlier—at an Art Basel event they sponsored in Miami Beach, Florida. Promoting the forthcoming release of a “product unlike anything [BMW had] ever produced,” the company paired the vehicle’s premiere with a live performance by hip-hop MC Nas and the exhibition of a commissioned artwork titled “Intrinsic Sage” by the Brooklyn sculptor Kennedy Yanko. With an anticipated six-figure sticker price, the XM was obviously intended for the luxury class, but BMW made ..read more

We all know that democracy is in trouble.  We are less sure what to blame. Political donations and invisible algorithms? The rise of a culture of personal rights replacing a culture of community? Or from the opposite perspective, the rise of a thing called ‘populism’. In Democracy, Theatre and Performance I look at a political problem from the perspective of a theatre historian interested in the art of the actor.  For centuries, actors have been the victims of prejudice, branded as professional liars.  It all seems to have started with Plato, who complained about the evils of rh ..read more

Thales of Miletus, in the 6th century BCE, asserted that “everything is full of gods”. In his view, even inanimate things were in fact animate. His vision of the world, taken up by Plato, implies the presence of an infinite number of divinities in the kosmos, which is also inhabited by human beings. The complexity of the religious systems in Antiquity – Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Phoenician, Nabataean, Iranian, etc. – known as “polytheisms” is a fascinating issue. Not only are there a large number of divinities, implanted in thousands of places – a sanctuary, a city, a wood, a cross ..read more