In 1981, a horrific murder case required police in East Germany to go door-to-door collecting handwriting samples. There was ...

T he sky in the northern hemisphere had been darkened, the winters unusually harsh, and the summers barely arriving for decades when the German Lutheran author Johann Arndt published his Four Books on ...

Man-Devil: The Mind and Times of Bernard Mandeville, the Wickedest Man in Europe by John J. Callanan revels in the making of ...

The vagaries of palace politics are notoriously difficult to record. Historians should pay attention to rumour. D onald Trump ...

Rosemary Wakeman’s The Worlds of Victor Sassoon: Bombay, London, Shanghai, 1918-1941 is a tale of three cities linked by ...

How many planets are there? As with the discovery of Uranus, the answer depends on who you ask. Detail from Joseph Wright of ...

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

British soldiers fighting in the American Revolutionary War were unprepared for the terrain awaiting them across the Atlantic ...

Naples 1343: The Unexpected Origins of the Mafia – Amedeo Feniello’s history of the Camorra – has this much in common with ...

The Tree Hunters is, like Pakenham’s earlier books, beautifully written and enjoyable to read. It radiates pleasure in its ...

In outline the disastrous events of Charles I’s reign are well known to students of the seventeenth century. The king’s inability to work with Parliament led, four years after his accession, to a ...

Why, almost alone of the megalithic structures of pre-history, was Stonehenge noticed and celebrated through the Middle Ages, from early at least in the twelfth century? That is the fair question to ...