How did a Gulf backwater become a global powerbroker? Saudi Arabia: A Modern History by David Commins explores the uneasy ...

Britain’s first book-of-the-month club – the Book Society – brought reading to a vast new audience. But not without some ...

How did Swahili become an East African lingua franca? It was not by accident. I n March 1960 Julius Nyerere – then leader of ...

In Language and Social Relations in Early Modern England Hillary Taylor listens in the archives for the voices of ordinary ...

‘The risks are acute when we turn to traditional periodisations’ Levi Roach is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Exeter There can be no doubt that monarchs bulk inordinately large in ...

Long overshadowed by Lindbergh, The Big Hop: The First Non-Stop Flight Across the Atlantic and Into the Future by David ...

The final, tense meeting between the sage and the tyrant was steeped in animosity, to judge by the account in Plato’s Third ...

On 5 July 1852 the curtain came down on Barney Barnato, one of the richest men in South Africa.

On 11 April 1942, during one of Hitler’s habitual monologues before his inner circle at the ‘Wolf’s Lair’ headquarters in East Prussia, talk turned to Alfred Rosenberg’s book The Myth of the Twentieth ...

In the medieval Golden Legend there is a story which purports to explain why the historian Bede is known as ‘the Venerable’, rather than a more common title like ‘Saint’. It claims that after Bede’s ...

The Writer’s Lot: Culture and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France by Robert Darnton discovers a literary flowering in the shadow of the guillotine.

I n 1905 the prison population of England and Wales was 21,525 and rising. In the decade that followed, that number nearly halved to 11,311. The trend continued, reaching a 20th-century low of 9,199 ...