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220 results
  • Article
  • Article

Cloves to mull, mask and numb

| Helen Babbs

Sweet, pungent, warm, woody: cloves smell and taste like Christmas. But there’s much more to this spice than that.

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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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Getting sexy with cinnamon

| Kirsten Riley

Add some flavour to your love life with this spice. It will warm up more than just your buns.

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Mask, ritual and fertility

| Chimwemwe PhiriSteven Pocock

Today many of us learn about fertility, conception and pregnancy online. But that wasn’t always the way. Discover how masks and rituals played an important educational role.

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The Key to Memory: Mark it out

Sarah Bentley explores what a papier-mâché figure from Japan can tell us about how and why we remember.

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Ken’s ten: looking back at ten years of Wellcome Collection

| Ken Arnold

Wellcome Collection founder Ken Arnold picks his favourite exhibits.

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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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Western magic’s fascination with the foreigner

| Shelley Angelie SaggarThomas S G Farnetti

Could modern magic shows be perpetuating damaging cultural stereotypes? Shelley Saggar shows how ‘exotic’ costumes and imagery are far from harmless fun.

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Our endless quest for eternal youth

| Dr Lindsey FitzharrisKathleen Arundell

From poisonous 16th-century cosmetics to the latest “vampire facelift”, discover the fashions in unsavoury methods for improving our appearance.

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  • Article

Rocking psychiatry with R D Laing

| Adrian ChapmanSteven Pocock

Turn on, tune in, drop out. Discover how six rock songs from the 1960s and 1970s link the ideas of famous therapist R D Laing with the era’s counterculture.

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Sex in graphic novels

| Stephen Lowther

Sex and sexuality have long been explored in the history of the graphic novel.

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A brief history of tattoos

| Amy Olson

The earliest evidence of tattoo art dates from 5000 BC, and the practice continues to hold meaning for many cultures around the world.

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Nurturing my autistic, gender-questioning child

| Jude LaxJack Lax

As mother of an autistic child who questions her gender, Jude Lax describes cherishing her growing daughter as she explores her identity.

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Confronting male stereotypes in the classroom

| Okechukwu NzeluRobin Hammond

Sometimes men just don’t like football. Writer and teacher Okechukwu Nzelu decides to be himself in front of his students.

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Race, religion and the Black Madonna

| Daniela Vasco

Mystery and controversy surround the dark-skinned religious icon who represents the Virgin Mary throughout the Catholic world.

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  • Article

Performance art, frozen in time

| Elissavet NtouliaKathleen Arundell

For over a year, live performance art with an audience present has been largely impossible. But still images continue to allow artists in this sphere to inspire audiences at home.

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Ginger’s role in cures and courtroom battles

| Alice White

Some people will use a dose of ginger to help with hangovers – but it hasn’t always been a friend to the thirsty.

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Drugs in Victorian Britain

| Louise Crane

Many common remedies were taken throughout the 19th century, with more people than ever using them. What was the social and cultural context of this development?

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Nymphomania and hypersexuality in women and men

| Taryn Cain

The history of nymphomania is closely bound with society's views on women and their sexuality.

  • Book extract
  • Book extract

“It wasn’t an accident that I came to you”

Douglas meets psychoanalyst Susie Orbach for a follow-up session, ahead of delivering a difficult verdict.

  • Photo story
  • Photo story

Transitioning and the family album

| Anthony Luvera

“It’s really hard to describe to people how you know you’re a man when those ways of describing masculinity to me aren’t true. You need to find your own.”

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How online dating can make us lonely

| Christina Patterson

The packed diary of an internet dater doesn’t necessarily denote fun, companionship and love. Find out what Christina Patterson learned on her internet-dating odyssey.

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Ways appear

| Chris North

While his sense of body shame meant the personal side of his life was unfulfilled, Chris’s career was rewarding. His own childhood experiences gave him profound empathy for the children he worked with.

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Inhaling happiness and gasping for a high

| Stevyn Colgan

The rapid, short-lived high we get from whippets, reefers and vapes can be accompanied by long-term health consequences. The search is on for safer ways to get stoned.

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How do advertisers get inside our heads?

| Charlie WilliamsSarah MarksDaniel Pick

Vance Packard exposed techniques of mass manipulation developed by 1950s advertisers that are still at work today in the age of big data.