It was called the “bloodiest border in Europe” for a reason. Thousands of people died escaping Nicolae Ceausescu’s communist regime of 1974-1989—no one knows exactly how many. People from all across Eastern Europe risked everything to flee south through Romania into Yugoslavia and freedom. This border was heavily patrolled and covered in tripwires and barbed-wire fences.

The winter season of 2024-25 marked a resurgence of fur clothing – both faux and real – in fashion across Europe and North America. Shearling jackets and embroidered “Penny Lane coats” featured widely in reports on the latest fashion trends. Vintage fur coats are also back in vogue.

As a materials scientist, I’m interested in what can happen when new materials become available. Glass, steel and rare earth magnets are all examples of how innovation in materials science has driven technological change and, as a result, shaped global economies, politics and the environment.

Practitioners of what is often called 'histoire totale' (or ‘total history’)——have engaged with the question of contingency, determination, human agency, and change in several discernible phases.

How the Marxist notion of ‘historical materialism’ has developed is well illustrated by examining its conceptual engagement with cultural and intellectual history, which can be observed through at least two broad phases: what Anderson calls the ‘Classical Tradition’ and, later, what became known as ‘cultural Marxism’.

During the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, the form of dualist heresy which later became known as ‘Catharism’ remained very much alive in the south of France despite the violent attempts of the Albigensian Crusade (1209-1229), and the subsequent Inquisition, to eradicate it.