The masculinity that Gerald represented, and that Peter was suggesting, was as far removed as possible from the secular ...

Arsenic was a hidden killer in Victorian homes, but it also played a large part in the British economy. Which comes first: ...

Writing from the safety of exile in eastern Tennessee, in the late 1850s the fiery Irish nationalist John Mitchel published a series of articles in his proslavery newspaper the Southern Citizen. In ...

In her 2010 memoir Tales from a Mountain City, Quynh Dao – who was 15 at the fall of Saigon in 1975 – describes returning to Dalat, a city in Vietnam’s Central Highlands, at the end of the war. The ...

Henry IV ascended the throne of England much to his own satisfaction in the year 1399. As opening lines for a history go, this is an excellent one. Its author was the teenage Jane Austen, in a lively ...

Across Britain, people could sense the end of the war approaching by the spring of 1945. After five-and-a-half years of death and destruction, VE Day would provide a moment of rejoicing and relief, ...

The Industrial Revolution was a profound crisis and upheaval in industrial organisation, or the way people work. This is a far more useful description than any which emphasise the shift away from ...

The Roman Empire had two main populations: gods and humans. By its end, there was only one god left. How, and why, did he reign supreme?

Epic of the Earth: Reading Homer’s Iliad in the Fight for a Dying World by Edith Hall sees the signs of environmental collapse amid the adventures of Achilles. Hall begins by tracing the poem’s ...

The Merovingians have a reputation for long hair and barbarity. Instead, the dynasty, born out of the chaos of civil war, was one of peace, diplomacy, and bureaucracy.

Renaissance Florence had a problem: it wanted female sex workers, but it also needed to offer them a way out. The solution was a new brothel district – and a nunnery for former prostitutes ...