The Decembrist revolt of 1825 saw Russia’s nobility attempt to depose tsar Nicholas I. Dismissed as romantic idealists, they ...

How to finance old age has been a problem since the inception of Britain’s welfare state. Why is pension reform so difficult?

Postwar state support for agriculture in the UK has been hailed a great success, but it had unexpected consequences. P rewar ...

Roundhead to Royalist, the Double Life of Cromwell’s Spy, Dennis Sewell asks whether George Downing was the ‘biggest ...

To the British officials in Nigeria they were the Aba Riots. But the Igbo and Ibibio women involved called them Ogu Umunwaanyi, the Women’s War. There had been tremors of discontent in 1925: in April ...

Henry VIII’s break with Rome was a watershed moment for England and for Christendom. Did the papacy have itself to blame?

Justine Firnhaber-Baker is Professor of History at the University of St Andrews. Her latest book is House of Lilies: The ...

In 1861 serfdom, the system which tied the Russian peasants irrevocably to their landlords, was abolished at the Tsar’s imperial command. Four years later, slavery in the USA was similarly declared ...

The colony of New South Wales did not have its own parliament until 1856, but it did have a tradition of public dinners and ...

Rome welcomed and tended to the vast numbers of pilgrims who arrived in the 16th century, but its attitude to its own poor ...

The Battle of Fitjar, fought in southern Norway in 961, was a struggle between King Hákon ‘the Good’, once the foster-son of King Æthelstan of England, and his nephews, the sons of Erik ‘Bloodaxe’.

It is often taken for granted that all European nations involved in the early Cold War, save Germany, fell naturally onto one side of the Iron Curtain or the other. Yet Czechoslovakia was not ...