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 ...

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

Early 17th-century machines were intricate, impressive, responsive, and lively in equal measure. Even so, for Descartes just ...

How did Swahili become an East African lingua franca? It was not by accident.

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

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

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