Factory girls

War art is often associated with male heroics – sketches dashed off under fire, or epic battlefield paintings filled with flags and explosions. Yet the value of women’s war art is that it helps captur

This year marks 80 years since the end of the Second World War. The conflict is rapidly fading from living memory as the last survivors die, and 2025 has seen the final surviving Battle of Britain pil

Past and present entwine at the Black Country Living Museum, where history is close enough to touch and stories of the past unfold

On a beautiful summer’s morning almost 110 years ago, men of the British Army stepped out into no-man’s land at 7.30am. It was 1 July 1916, and the start of what was then called ‘The Big Push’. With h

Musical instruments have power, simply as things. They speak. They generate emotion. They tell stories about life, death, happiness and sadness – and about the past, which they can resurrect with curi

Even the most successful and affluent individuals are not immune to the effects of shell shock, a powerful reminder that, beneath status and achievement, we are all fundamentally human. As I sift thro