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Michael Faraday had a close friendship with Benjamin Abbott which served as a surrogate family tie and left most of what little record remains of Faraday's early life. Faraday wrote 52 extant letters to Abbott and two letters from Abbott survive besides an obituary Abbott wrote about Faraday. Abbott also wrote 'Jottings from Memory' about Faraday and the text of the manuscript is included for its first publication.

An obituary and tribute is presented for British historian of science David Charles Gooding (1947-2009).

The article highlights the address delivered by Prime Minister James Ramsay MacDonald at the Queen's Hall in Great Britain on September 21, 1931. The speech discusses the specific events of celebrating Michael Faraday for the discovery of electromagnetic induction. September is seen by historians as one of the key months in interwar British history as it directly linked with the crises and growth of the corporate and coordinated state and the rise of modernity. Other topics tackled during the speech is included, like the Invergordon Mutiny and of Britain being forced off the gold standard.

In 1976 Raymond Williams commented, 'Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.' Such implied difficulty has not prevented Bloomsbury Academic, since the 2000s, from publishing around forty series of their well-produced and generously illustrated Cultural Histories, with, according to their website, a further fifty in progress. Each series contains six volumes, each book covering, in theory, the same chronological period (antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the age of empire and the modern age), though there is some variation depending on precise topic. The idea is that one can use these books not only to read 'horizontally' about a subject across time, but also 'vertically' through different subjects in the same period - a idea made easier by the e-texts of the series on Bloomsbury's website.