Peasants and popes, free speech and fashion, sentimentality and special forces: the first 10 of 20 historians choose their ...

I n the archive of Carl Hagenbeck’s Tierpark (Animal Park), which opened in Hamburg in 1907, there is a remarkable photograph ...

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

When putting the Middle Ages on screen, drama is no substitute for the historical sources.

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

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

Heiresses: Marriage, Inheritance and Caribbean Slavery by Miranda Kaufman follows the money to reveal how Britain’s women of ...

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 ...

Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, also known as La Gioconda, is the most famous painting in the world. Quantities of effort and ink have been spent over the years on identifying who she was and deciding ...

There has been no stranger episode in the long history of the English Christmas than the attempt to suppress both the religious and the secular celebrations during the period between 1644 and 1659.

A passage from book 12 of The Odyssey, in Emily Wilson’s acclaimed translation of Homer’s epic, sees the hero Odysseus, known in Latin as Ulysses, warn his men of an impending challenge: She [Circe] ...