Bleeding Nun News Today

With its outlandish costumes and saucy slapstick, and an audience that boos and hisses, the annual pantomime is as much part of Christmas as the tree, crackers and plum pudding, writes Robert Hume

The most popular form of visual entertainment before cinema, phantasmagoria specialised in thrilling audiences with macabre illusions created through trickery and science. Writing for HistoryExtra, Fabio Camilletti explores the phenomenon that transfixed audiences in the 18th and 19th centuries and influenced much of the Gothic fiction of the time…