What makes someone a king? More importantly, what unmakes a king? Henry II’s experiment in co-kingship saw one Henry III fall ...

The Grammar of Angels: A Search for the Magical Powers of Language by Edward Wilson-Lee finds in Giovanni Pico della ...

The concerns of daily life prompted early modern people to seek reassurance in fate, stars, and astrologers.

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 East African groundnuts scheme was postwar Britain’s equivalent of the Millennium Dome. In pursuit of a laudable objective, millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money was poured diligently into a sump ...

Defeated in the First World War, humiliated, desperately short of food and assailed by the influenza epidemic that swept Europe, Germany was in a critical state. The Kaiser abdicated as emperor and on ...

The king died early in 1066 and was interred in the church of the abbey at Westminster, which he had refounded and to which he had devoted much time, energy and money. His piety is not in doubt, ...

Long before Louis Braille’s time, attempts had been made to create embossed letters or shapes on wood or paper to enable the blind to read by touch. After the Napoleonic Wars, a French artillery ...

Granddaughter of William the Conqueror, daughter of Henry I and the future mother of Henry II, Matilda was born in England in 1102. On her mother’s side she was the grandchild of Malcolm III of Scots ...

'The East is a university in which the scholar never takes his degree', George Curzon, Viceroy-designate of India, told an Old Etonian dinner in 1898. 'It is a temple where the suppliant adores but ...

Taken by Edward III in 1347, Calais had become the main port through which English wool was profitably exported abroad. From 1536 it sent members to the English parliament and the town’s ...