Jeanne de Clisson was born in the French town of Belleville-sur-Vie in 1300. She was the one of the de Belleville family, who had ruled in the area for hundreds of years. In fact, she wound up being ...

Christina of Sweden was trouble, right from the moment she was born. Her parents had no surviving children, and her mother Maria was desperate to give King Gustavus a son. The only legitimate heirs to ...

Diogenes was born over twenty-four hundred years ago, which is more of a problem than historians like to admit. People didn’t keep great records back then, of course, and not much was written down. Of ...

Abel Debritto, a former Fulbright and Marie Curie scholar, works in the digital humanities and is a certified Iyengar yoga teacher. He is the author of Charles Bukowski, King of the Underground, and ...

The Victorian attitude to Africa was an unusual one. India they understood, they thought. India was a known quantity. But Africa…Africa was a mystery. There’s a phrase that’s used to describe those ...

It’s always interesting when a historical figure has to be re-evaluated in the light of new evidence. For over a century James Hammond was a controversial figure, and allegations about his personal ...

Ciarán O'Rourke is a freelance writer from Dublin. His essays and reviews have been widely published, and his poetry collections are available from The Irish Pages Press.

There are always those who see opportunity in chaos. The destruction of the old order leaves gaps that need filling, and “men of vision” see nobody better than themselves to fill those gaps. This does ...

The genius of Eugène François Vidocq lay in one simple principle. In order to catch a criminal, you had to be able think like a criminal. And in his case that was easy, because he was one. He’s ...

Natalie Clifford Barney was born in 1876 in Dayton, Ohio. Dayton is a city that has produced more than its share of pioneers – the Wright brothers, Charles Kettering and many others. Natalie wasn’t an ...

There’s nothing that epitomises the attitudes of pre-Revolutionary France quite like the job of executioner. The men in this job served the royal will, dealing out death and torture as decreed by the ...

Does animation still look as visually unique as it once did? Some people don’t think so. Some believe that the modern animation style has fallen into one of two genres: firstly the anime aesthetic, ...