The Public Domain Review

More than a century before the Eurostar and LeShuttle, a group of engineers and statesmen dreamed (and fretted) about connecting Britain to France with an underwater tunnel. Peter Keeling drills into the history of this submarine link, and finds a still-relevant story about the cosmopolitan hopes and isolationist panic surrounding liberal internationalism.

A self-styled glaciologist, Rabot undertook four expeditions to the Arctic in his lifetime, taking stunning photographs that capture an abiding sense of stillness.

This strange volume puts the lie to Ditchfield’s title: tyrants, not books, kill authors.

Each January 1st is Public Domain Day, when a new crop of works have their copyrights expire and become free to share and reuse for any purpose. Here's our highlights for 2024.

From gin-drinking to cities plunging over clifftops, a rundown of the ten most read pieces we published this year.

The story of how a homemade, anti-capitalist game created by a woman becomes a mass-produced uber-capitalist game that profited a man.

In an era when the Enlightenment’s orderly vision of the natural world began to unravel, Anna Atkins produced the world’s first photography book: a collection of cyanotypes, created across a decade beginning in 1843, that captured algal forms in startling blue-and-white silhouettes. Paige Hirschey situates Atkins’ efforts among her naturalist peers, discovering a form of illustration that, rather than exhibit an artist’s mastery over nature, allowed specimens to “illustrate” themselves.

Desprez’s 121 engravings illustrate garbs supposedly found the world over in 1562, worn by humans and monsters alike.

A festive collection of literary parody by the “incomparable” Max Beerbohm.

Our End-of-Year Fundraiser is launched, and the new postcards theme will be The Heavens.