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68 results
  • Article
  • Article

Booze and bad behaviour

| Stevyn Colgan

Our love of alcohol is like a party that’s lasted nine centuries. But there are signs that the demon drink is losing its appeal.

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The Key to Memory: Follow your nose

Elissavet Ntoulia explores what a pair of pomanders can tell us about how and why we remember.

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Fees, funding and the NHS

| Cal Flyn

In the 1950s, dramatic political battles over NHS charges brought down a government. But public confidence in the service still grew.

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NHS strikes and the decade of discontent

| Cal Flyn

When the social unrest of the 1970s spread to the NHS, dissatisfied staff challenged the status quo for the first time in quarter of a century.

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Bubbles of history

| Alice BellKathleen Arundell

Since the 1960s, scientists have been able to study the air from past centuries by analysing particles in Arctic ice samples. But as the polar ice melts, the future of this research is changing.

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Bringing Braille back to the modern world

| Alex LeeIan Treherne

For anyone who thinks Braille is so last century, read on. New tech is helping dust Braille down and bring it to today’s visually impaired people.

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NHS Blue: the colour of universal healthcare

| Cal Flyn

The 1980s and 1990s saw ideas from the world of business infiltrating the NHS, including the introduction of an internal market, followed by a corporate branding exercise.

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The birth of Britain's National Health Service

| Cal Flyn

Starkly unequal access to healthcare gave rise to Nye Bevan’s creation of a truly national health service.

  • Book extract
  • Book extract

The history of brainwashing

| Daniel PickSteven Pocock

Is it possible to control what other people think? In this abridged extract from his book ‘Brainwashed’, psychoanalyst and historian Daniel Pick offers us a new history of thought control.

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A history of mindfulness

| Matt Drage

Matt Drage questions how an ancient religious practice became a secular cure for stress.

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A history of gestation outside the body

| Claire Horn

It’s been over 400 years since a Swiss alchemist theorised that foetuses could develop outside the womb. Claire Horn examines incubator technology past and present, and explores the possibilities recent prototypes might bring.

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Witches

| Helen FosterEast Midlands Oral History ArchiveAsma Istwani

Many of the women persecuted as witches in the 16th-century “witch craze” were over 50 and exhibited signs of menopause. Helen Foster suggests that the stigma of the wicked witch still affects older women and how they deal with menopause.

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Not one yoga, but many yogas

| Lalita Kaplish

From ancient tradition to modern gym class, yoga means many things to many people.

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How to be poor and happy

| Em LedgerCamilla Greenwell

Money, security, self-sufficiency and charitable giving have long been linked to happiness. But what if you’re working class?

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Exceptional talent and the trouble with IQ tests

| Anna Faherty

Is a high IQ really a mark of genius, or does something else explain the exceptional?

  • Long read
  • Long read

Rehab centres and the ‘cure’ for addiction

| Guy StaggJess Nash

Guy Stagg takes us on a brief history of rehab centres and their approaches to addiction and recovery.

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The life and death of Tamagotchi and the virtual pet

| Jenna Jovi

Discover how the 1990s craze for Tamagotchis became a flood of robotic and virtual pets, sending their owners on an emotional rollercoaster ride.

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Thunderbolts and lightning

| Ruth Garde

Fire in the sky has always exerted a hold on our imagination, even as early scientists unlocked the secrets of atmospheric electricity.

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Desperate housewives and suburban neurosis

| Giulia Smith

Discover how a pioneering health centre replaced housewives’ supposedly empty home lives with a social space that encouraged healthy child rearing.

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Indian botanicals and heritage wars

| Sita Reddy

Colonial botanical texts, as astonishingly beautiful as they are, may cast very dark shadows.

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Shakespeare and the four humours

| Nelly Ekström

Blood. Phlegm. Black bile. Yellow bile. The theory of the four humours informed many of Shakespeare's best-known characters, including the phlegmatic Falstaff.

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Pain and the power of touch

| Fiona MurphyCamilla Greenwell

As a new physiotherapist, Fiona Murphy quickly learned that her patients’ pain was unpredictable and very personal. But using the right words became the key to helping them.

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Political brilliance and the power of self-promotion

| Anna Faherty

How do you convince people you’re exceptional? Meet the ultimate self-styled genius.

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The tower in fiction, film and life

| Emily Sargent

The high-rise estates born of postwar idealism soon became symbols of crime and squalor. But after one terrible tragedy, public bodies are being forced to rethink our towers.

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The unexpected parallels between Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Wellcome Collection

| Russell Dornan

With the news of a sequel in development, Russell Dornan explores parallels between ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ and Wellcome Collection.