• Colour drawing of a staged theatrical scene framed by two symmetrical classical structures with niches containing gilded statues, flanked by trees. At the centre, a painted backdrop shows an island within an archipelago, with a visible settlement; in the foreground, a vessel approaches the shore. Four figures stand before the backdrop holding branches and other objects. The composition is enclosed within a thin rectangular gold border.

Costume – Celebrating 50 Years of Publication

By Valerie Cumming and Alexandra Kim The year 2017 marks the fiftieth anniversary of Costume as a journal and we are celebrating this milestone in a number of different ways. The most obvious is that Costume‘s cover design has been…

soldier reading

Ford Madox Ford, music and the First World War

My research treats music as a crucial aspect of modernist literature, and the First World War was a crucial event for modernist writers, profoundly changing the fabric of social life. Ford Madox Ford served on the front line and wrote…

Shakespeare’s Questions

By Kevin Curran, University of Lausanne What is it about Shakespeare’s writing that makes it endure? Why do his plays and poems continue to entertain, engage, and instruct more than 400 years on? I think it might have something to do with…

The Red Menace

The article “British Conservatives, the Red Menace and Antiforeign Agitation in China, 1924–1927” in our journal Cultural History looks at how British conservatives used the events in China as proof of the Red Menace in order to reinforce demands about…