This is the time of year when many of us are enjoying holidays and taking a break from routine. So here again are some previous posts you may have missed.

1. As the Actress said to the Cabinet Minister… The relationship between Mrs. Sarah Siddons, the greatest tragic actress of her age (and maybe all time) and The Rt. Hon. William Windham, cabinet minister and Norfolk squire.
2. The C18th British Secret Service under Pitt Discover the surprisingly sophisticated organisation that was the eighteenth-century British Secret Service; and M’s eighteenth-century predecessor.: the man who handled the crucial spy networks in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France.
3. The Terrible Danger of Romantic Novels explores the reaction to the birth of a new kind of writing: the novel. Did circulating libraries and romantic novels corrupt C18th women, as many people of the time claimed?
4. Georgian ‘Consumerism’? We know we live in a ‘consumer society’, with all the perils that produces along with the benefits. But we are not the first to live like that. The Georgians actually invented consumerism.
5. How to Block an Appeal Against the Poor-Rate! An 18th-century spat over ‘welfare benefits’ and cost of providing for those people who could not work.
6. Essential Reading for Georgian Lovers? Need to know how to turn attraction into true love? Try this lovers’ manual from 1780, when to be ‘polite’ also meant knowing the rules for the proper conduct during courtship.