Bestiaries – medieval books containing descriptions of real-life and imaginary animals, accompanied by moralising tales – ...

The Brothers Grimm: A Biography by Ann Schmiesing brings folklore’s most famous double act out of the shadowy realm of legend ...

Tool of social control or check on tyranny? The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages by Shane Bobrycki crafts a history for the ...

In Augustus the Strong: A Study in Artistic Greatness and Political Fiasco, Tim Blanning restores the ‘incorrigible Saxon’ to ...

Russia’s entry into the global economy was met with glee by international firms in the early 1990s. The exodus has been just ...

The Russians were among the first Europeans to sense California's potential. Had they not sold their settlement there in 1841 ...

Today a ‘beautiful but broken shell’, the Parthenon has housed three very different cults – those of Athena, Allah and the Blessed Virgin – since it was first constructed in the fifth century BC. It ...

The vigorous, turbulent Stuart century was an age of cosmetic extravagance. Encouraged by poems like Jonson’s “Celia” and Herrick’s “Julia”, women patched, painted, perfumed and powdered themselves to ...

A.H. Burne describes how, 500 years ago at the Battle of Castillon, where the Great Talbot lost his life, the English crown forfeited its 300-year-old dominion over Aquitaine.

Baghdad was the seat of the Abbasid caliphs from the eighth century. In 1248, however, Genghis Khan’s grandson Möngke became great khan of the Mongols and resolved to extend his sway to the Middle ...

No two travellers ever explored the new world with such different hopes and aspirations as François-René Vicomte de Chateaubriand and his nephew, Alexis Charles Henri Clerel de Tocqueville. Yet by ...

Charles Sherwood Stratton seemed a perfectly normal baby when he was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1838, but from the age of six or seven months he stopped growing. He added a few inches later on ...