When women let their hair down, it means either sexiness or craziness or death, the three by Victorian times having become virtually synonymous.

What Elizabethan playwrights learned from the Greek classics was not theories of insanity, but dramatic practice - that is, madness is a dandy theatrical eleme…

We tend to think of Freud as a great innovator, but the truth is that he himself rested, like a ship on an iceberg, on a huge body of theory and knowledge whic…

However, there are all sorts of behaviours in the Bible that might be called mad now, but aren't designated as insanity by the text itself. People see visions …

Ewald von Kleist was an officer and a gentleman in an era when such characteristics were liabilities.

The nineteenth century will colonize; so, in its fantasies, did the nineteenth century soul. When Emma [Bovary] turns spendthrift and buys curtains, carpets an…

Geography was not furthered by the achievement, scientific progress was scarcely hastened, and nothing new was discovered. Yet the names of Hillary and Tenzing…