Prejudice

Seventy-three prisoners were condemned to death at the Old Bailey in 1835 at a time when there were more than 200 capital offences on the statute book. Nevertheless, all had their sentences commuted apart from two: James Pratt and John Smith, who were convicted of ‘the detestable and abominable crime’ of sodomy. The indictment stated that the accused had been ‘seduced by the instigation of the devil’ ‘The love that dare not speak its name’ may forever be associated with Alfred Douglas and Oscar Wilde, but the same reticence was clearly evident in the first half of the century. When in 1828 Sir Robert Peel introduced the Offences Against the

If chicken soup is balm for the soul, then James McBride’s eighth book, set in 1930s Chicken Hill, a neighbourhood in a small town in Pennsylvania that is home to Jewish, black and other immigrant people, is its literary equivalent. There is something nourishing about The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, a warm story about the power of community in the face of prejudice that both salutes the American dream while exposing it as a sham. Like much of McBride’s previous work, which includes four other novels, a biography of James Brown and his 1996 memoir, A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother, about his Jewish mother, Ruth, The

The moment before the fall of women’s football can be precisely dated. On Boxing Day 1920, Dick, Kerr Ladies FC beat St Helens 4-0 at Everton’s Goodison Park in front of 53,000 paying spectators, a sellout crowd. That was too much for the men at the Football Association. Hysterical at the sight of women running about as they liked and scared of competition from the female game, they banned it a year later. ‘The game of football is quite unsuitable for females,’ its ruling explained. From then on, the FA barred men’s clubs from letting women use their fields. Female players were condemned to jumpers for goalposts in parks. In

This is the best of times to be writing history, since so much of what has been taken for granted, especially in the West, is being revised. Assumptions about the past that we accepted as fact, and events we once looked upon with pride, are now being questioned. A dark cloud hovers over the Benin Bronzes, Elgin Marbles and Rosetta Stone in the British Museum and looks likely to burst. The same applies to figures who were considered heroes and placed on pedestals. If the statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square had not been covered recently, it might have followed the fate of Edward Colston’s. Into this febrile atmosphere

In Ladies Can’t Climb Ladders, the social historian Jane Robinson — whose previous books include histories of suffragettes and bluestockings — champions British women who were ‘first-footers’ in the elite fields of academia, architecture, the Church, engineering, law and medicine.One and a half million women joined the workforce during the first world war (at half the pay of their male counterparts). After the war, however, they were expected to cede their jobs to returning servicemen and resume the role of ‘angel in the house’. The 1919 Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act allowed women to qualify for professions, but it was limited in scope. Women were deemed unfit for purpose for many