Tag: politics

  • Marking the Women’s Suffrage Centenary in Cambridge

    Marking the Women’s Suffrage Centenary in Cambridge

    By Helen Sunderland (@hl_sunderland) 6 February will mark one hundred years since the first women in Britain gained the right to vote in national elections. The Representation of the People Act of 1918 enfranchised 40% of women in the UK and was the result of decades of campaigning by various organisations across the country. It…

  • Resistance in Russia: A Reflection on International Women’s Day

    Resistance in Russia: A Reflection on International Women’s Day

    By Mobeen Hussain (@amhuss27) This year’s International Women’s Day, on March 8th, was marked across the world with various marches, proclamations and campaigns highlighting inequalities and celebrating women. In the last two years, we have seen feminist campaigns in various institutions to challenge ongoing inequalities that disproportionately affect women, including sexual abuse, the gender pay…

  • England’s First Double Agents?

    England’s First Double Agents?

    By Fred Smith | @Fred_E_Smith The disturbing events which have recently unfolded in the small English town of Salisbury appear to belong more to the set of a Hollywood spy thriller or the pages of an Ian Fleming novel than to reality. From a historical perspective, the role of spies and informants on all sides during both the…

  • Expressions of “Russian exceptionalism”: a historical continuity?

    Expressions of “Russian exceptionalism”: a historical continuity?

    By Mobeen Hussain (@amhuss27) Vladimir Putin was unsurprisingly victorious in this month’s presidential elections on the 18th of March. As with all political campaigns, candidates routinely utilise powerful self-branding images. In Putin’s case, historic forms of Russian exceptionalism were re-imagined to run on a distinct platform based on anti-Americanism, similar to his previous campaigns. Michael Bohm, in…

  • Gossip, men, and Victorian politics

    Gossip, men, and Victorian politics

    By Cherish Watton (@CherishWatton) Gossip in politics today brings to mind the political rumour-mill from the fallout of Brexit, political infighting, or frequent leaks from the White House criticising the Trump administration. But gossip, the ability ‘to talk idly, mostly about other people’s affairs’, isn’t unique to twenty-first-century politics.[1] In the Victorian period, it could…