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 ...

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

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

On November 23rd, 1499, Perkin Warbeck was drawn on a hurdle from the Tower to Tyburn to be hanged. A native of Tournai, his six-year masquerade as Richard, Duke of York had come to an end two years ...

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?

In exile, Hortense Mancini captivated 17th-century Europe – and king Charles II – with her beauty and charm. But her path to freedom was mired in scandal.

How can historians of Tibet – a region whose history is tightly controlled by the Chinese authorities – gain access to its recent past? Comparing newspapers from either side of the Himalayas might ...

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

Pope Paul III did not mince his words. In the bull of excommunication promulgated on 17 December 1538, he reviled Henry VIII as a tyrant who had ‘transformed himself into a beast’. This was a king, ...