Enlarge / The final letter from George Mallory from Camp I, Mount Everest, to his wife Ruth Mallory, May 27, 1924. (credit: The Master and Fellows of Magdalene College, Cambridge)

In June 1924, a British mountaineer named George Leigh Mallory and a young engineering student named Andrew "Sandy" Irvine set off for the summit of Mount Everest and disappeared—just two casualties of a peak that has claimed over 300 lives to date. Mallory was an alumnus of Magdalene College at the University of Cambridge, which maintains a collection of his personal correspondence, much of it between Mallory and his wife, Ruth. The college has now digitized the entire collection for public access. The letters can be accessed and downloaded here .

“It has been a real pleasure to work with these letters," said Magdalene College archivist Katy Green . "Whether it’s George’s wife Ruth writing about how she was posting him plum cakes and a grapefruit to the trenches (he said the grapefruit wasn’t ripe enough), or whether it’s his poignant last letter where he says the chances of scaling Everest are '50 to 1 against us,' they offer a fascinating insight into the life of this famous Magdalene alumnus.”

As previously reported , Mallory is the man credited with uttering the famous line "because it's there" in response to a question about why he would risk his life repeatedly to summit Everest. An avid mountaineer, Mallory had already been to the mountain twice before the 1924 expedition: once in 1921 as part of a reconnaissance expedition to produce the first accurate maps of the region and again in 1922—his first serious attempt to summit, although he was forced to turn back on all three attempts. A sudden avalanche killed seven Sherpas on his third try, sparking accusations of poor judgement on Mallory's part.

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The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific and philosophical concepts

Which individual has been treated most unfairly by history? Alex Middleton, Rutland

Post your answers (and new questions) below or send them to nq@theguardian.com . A selection will be published next Sunday.

Much historical footwear looks like torture – and extreme and unstable designs are still being made. Why can’t we all just be comfortable?

“In a world governed by ideal economic conditions … there will be no sensible shoes,” 1920s shoe designer André Perugia once said . We’re all wearing comfy, sexless trainers now, so draw your own conclusions. Thankfully, history has plenty of silly footwear at hand to amuse us, while we wonder where all our money went.

Paleoanthropologists can tell when we started to wear shoes regularly by looking at feet: toe bones became spindlier about 40,000 years ago. Most of that footwear was too organic to survive. The oldest known example is a pair of sagebrush bark sandals that are probably about 10,000 years old and look like something many Guardian readers would wear; while Ötzi the iceman had a chic-er pair in 3300-ish BC, with a bearskin base, deerskin side panels, and a bark-string net to pull them closed. “The thick layer of hairs gives good insulation and a soft feeling to walk on,” a researcher who reconstructed them commented, which sounds like a four-star review to me.

Researchers find shift from agriculture to manufacturing first gained pace under Stuart monarchs

The Industrial Revolution started more than 100 years earlier than previously thought, new research suggests, with Britons already shifting from agricultural work to manufacturing in the 1600s.

Seventeenth century Britain can be understood as the start of the Industrial Revolution , laying down the foundations for a shift from an agricultural and crafts-based society to a manufacturing-dominated economy, in which networks of home-based artisans worked with merchants, functioning similarly to factories.

Some schoolkids are clearly nervous. One asked if I’d ever killed a child

I’ve always been interested in the past. At school, I threw myself into history lessons. I turned one of my mum’s bedsheets into a toga so I could pretend to be a Roman, and spent holidays learning hieroglyphics long after lessons on ancient Egypt had finished.

When I was eight, we did the Tudors at school, and my aunt took me to the Tower of London, not far from where I grew up in Thurrock, Essex. I was spellbound. Back home, I’d pore over my mum’s Encyclopaedia Britannica, try to copy Hans Holbein portraits, and watch documentaries about Henry VIII over and over. There was just something magical about the Tudors.

As the author of a book about a pivotal uprising in 18th-century Jamaica, Vincent Brown was enlisted in a campaign to make its leader a national hero. But when he arrived in Jamaica, he started to wonder what he had got himself into

• Read more in this series: Cotton Capital

‘Let’s get something straight,” the politician told me, “we are now owning you.” Though this was meant as a warm welcome, hearing it from an eminent state official made me wonder what I had got myself into. Olivia Grange, Jamaica’s influential minister of culture, gender, entertainment and sport, looked me in the eyes: “You are Jamaican now, you are part of us.”

I met Grange last April, on a hot day in Port Maria in St Mary parish on the northern coast of Jamaica. Both of us had come to the town to commemorate the second annual Chief Takyi Day . Grange had established the holiday in 2022, instigating the government’s proclamation that henceforth 8 April would honour Takyi, or Tacky, as he was generally called in English, the best-known leader of the largest uprising of enslaved Africans in the 18th-century British empire. I was invited to the event because I had written the first book about Tacky’s revolt.

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Lecturer and social historian whose books on witchcraft transformed the study of the subject

In the mid-1990s the historian James Sharpe, who has died aged 77, wrote Instruments of Darkness, a book on witch-hunting in England that reopened a field of research that had been in the doldrums for a generation after the Welsh historian Keith Thomas ’s brilliant Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971). Published in 1996, Jim’s book helped to make the study of British witchcraft what it is today: one of the most lively areas of historical writing.

Earlier historians had argued that whereas witch-hunting on the European continent was fantastical, dominated by beliefs about the devil, English witch-hunting was comparatively rational and down-to-earth, centred on beliefs about the practical harm that witches caused to people and animals. Jim showed that this was nonsense, and that English witch-hunting was also powered by fear of the devil and followed much the same pattern as many other European countries.

Bloody docu-drama Royal Kill List tells the vengeful tale of Charles II. Plus: the ever-loveable Mel Giedroyc hears more cringeworthy celebrity stories. Here’s what to watch tonight