What do we get when we lend our ears to Eric Hobsbawm? Passion. Energy. Exhilarating sweeps of time; giddy swoops into political darkness...

Sleep is necessary to life. However, it remains shrouded in mystery, despite the fact that most people spend one third of their lives...

What does it mean to be human? We inhabit a world that is commonly, and lazily, dubbed ‘post-human’. Indeed, in recent decades, an anti...

We are never told her name. None of the soldiers encircling her would have been interested in such niceties. The only relevant...

God, the source of natural law is dead: long live international law, with its hallowed spectre, human rights. State-sponsored terror,...

Fear, grief, sorrow: these are the overriding emotions of war. For men, women, and children confined to the home front between 1914 and...

In August 1812, eminent novelist Frances Burney described with alarming precision her mounting sense of terror as she prepared to undergo...

The three sites of cruelty I will explore are (firstly) hierarchies of sentience, (secondly) wartime wounding, and (thirdly) sexual...

Kennedy’s great passion is for law. She was called to the Bar at Gray’s Inn in 1972. At the age of only 24 years, just out of pupillage,...

Jude Kelly is known to millions of people around the world. She is a theatre director, with more than 100 productions to her name....

‘If we are to end violence against women and girls, we need to create seismic shifts across our social norms’. So says Marai Larasi,...

When Birkbeck was established in 1823, it was called the London Mechanics’ Institution. It was one of the first ‘mechanics’ institutes’...

On 4 March 2020, the Black feminist organisation Imkaan launched a report in the Houses of Parliament on sexual violence against...

On 12 June 1993, the editors of the British Medical Journal published an account by a male doctor of being sexually assaulted by another...

The Covid-19 pandemic is a stark reminder of human vulnerability. To be vulnerable (from the Latin ‘vulnus’, meaning ‘wound’) is to be...

Covid-19 exposed girls, women, and other minoritised groups to increased domestic violence. As has happened throughout the world, calls...

Andrea Quinlan’s 2017 book The Technoscientific Witness of Rape: Contentious Histories of Law, Feminism, and Forensic Science ...

What if nurses in A&E wards or staff at rape crisis centres could give rape victims a drug that would make them feel emotionally composed...

In 1918-19, the world was in the midst of a global influenza pandemic, that killed 50 million people (more than the 1914-18 war). When...

Evil women. This is the first of a series of blogs about evil women, so, before turning to Eve’s evil legacies, I want to draw attention...