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Stories

  • Article

Robinson Crusoe and the morality of solitude

Robinson Crusoe, fiction’s most famous castaway, was certainly isolated, but did he suffer the intrinsically modern affliction of loneliness?

  • Article

The father of handwashing

Doctors performing autopsies and then delivering babies – with not a hint of soap in between – was the grim recipe producing a lot of motherless offspring in the 1800s. But one man’s gargantuan efforts to upend accepted medical thinking turned the tide.

  • Article

How I escaped my anxiety and depression through architecture and poetry

Social anxiety led him to introversion and silence. The brutalist architecture of London’s Barbican Estate inspired his liberation in poetry.

  • Article

What is air, and how do we know?

Watching bubbles in fermenting beer led 18th-century scientist Joseph Priestley to invent sparkling water – and to discover that different gases make up the air we breathe.

All stories (10)

Images

  • 'Sita Vanavasa' or Sita in exile.
  • Sita in exile. Chromolithograph by R. Varma.
  • Nala and Damayanti in exile in the forest. Chromolithograph.
  • A Chinese officer is holding a prisoner by his chain and leading him away into exile. Coloured stipple print by J. Dadley, 1801.
  • A woman plays music to a stag; God condemns Adam and Eve to exile; representing the sense of hearing. Engraving by N. de Bruyn after M. de Vos.
  • Moses' people in exile in Egypt are compared to metals that are strengthened by being exposed to fire in a furnace without being consumed. Line engraving by C. Visscher after C. van Mander.
  • A man sits and paints a picture of the exiled Adam and Eve; his wife suckles a baby; representing the thirtieth year of life. Engraving by Conrad Meyer, 16--.
  • The representative of the people of Jetuttara requests Prince Vessantara to leave the city. Watercolour.
  • The body of Napoleon Bonaparte laid out after death, 1821. Wood engraving after J. Ward.
  • The body of Napoleon Bonaparte laid out after death, 1821. Wood engraving after J. Ward.
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Catalogue

All works (302)