Historian Virginia Berridge has recently completed her term as a deputy chair of the London Drugs Commission, which published its report, 'The Cannabis Conundrum', in May of this year. Established by the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, the commission investigated the implications of the non-medical use of cannabis in the capital and the impact of the current laws which govern it. Virginia brought a historian's perspective to an investigation otherwise dominated by legal specialists. To be a historian in this environment was rewarding, challenging and revealing. In this post, Virginia explains how her expertise in histories of public health policy helped shape the enquiry, and how - and in what ways - others engage with history when it comes to present-day policy formation. As Virginia shows, understanding how academic history is regarded by non-specialists is key to ensuring the centrality and informed use of our discipline in the policy sphere.

In May 2025, members of the Royal Historical Society's Council visited the University of Exeter’s Cornwall Campus, Penryn, as part of the Society's annual programme of visits to departments across the UK. Visits are a chance to meet not just with historians working across the university, and with university managers, but also with undergraduate and postgraduate students to learn more about their experience of study. In this post we hear from Charlotte Arthurs, a final year History and Politics student on her three years studying at the Cornwall Campus. Central to Charlotte's hugely positive experience has been attention placed at Penryn on interdisciplinary teaching. The Society's next two visits are to the historians and history students at the universities of Aberdeen and Suffolk, with further visits planned later in 2025 and 2026.

In this post Michael Taylor introduces his new volume in the Royal Historical Society's Camden Series, 'The Papers of Admiral George Grey', published in June 2025. The volume presents the memoir, journal, and correspondence of George Grey (1809-1891), son of the Whig prime minister Earl Grey. It documents the Grey family’s experience of the Whig ministry of 1830–1834, and George Grey’s own naval career which took him from the Battle of Navarino during the Greek War of Independence, to a decisive survey of the Falkland Islands, and then to the capital cities of South America during their pivotal early decades of independence. In doing so, Michael's volume sheds new light on the political, diplomatic, naval, and imperial histories of the early and mid-nineteenth century. The full text of 'The Papers of Admiral George Grey', is now available open access via Cambridge University Press, following a subvention by the Royal Historical Society.