The 19th-century whale hunt was a brutal business, awash with blubber, blood, and the cruel destruction of life. But between the frantic calls of “there she blows!”, there was plenty of time for creation too. Jessica Boyall explores the rich vein of illustration running through the logbooks and journals of Nantucket whalers.

An artful rogues’ gallery compiled by a mysterious Hungarian photographer during his decade in America.

An admiring account of Jean-Baptiste Godin’s factory, social housing, and workers’ co-operative in the French town of Guise.

With characteristic skill and wit, Hogarth’s frontispiece for Joshua Kirby’s Method of Perspective shows the pitfalls of getting it wrong.

Its our big birthday! We celebrate with a year-by-year glance back over the last decade of the project.

It's been a strange year to put it mildly, but we've been honoured to have so many include the PDR in your daily surf. Here's a rundown of our Top 10 most read of the year...

As the French Revolution entered its most radical years, there emerged in print a recurring figure, the collective power of the people expressed as a single gigantic body — a king-eating Colossus. Samantha Wesner traces the lineage of this nouveau Hercules, from Erasmus Darwin’s Bastille-breaking giant to a latter incarnation in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Colorful chromolithograph postcards depicting Don Quixote in twentieth-century scenes.

Mushroom babies, heroic tortoises, death, burial, power struggles: folk tales from southern Nigeria as filtered through the sensibility of a colonial administrator.