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 ...

One of my favourite places in the world is the Living Hall of the Frick Collection in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Either side of its fireplace, crowned by a St Jerome of El Greco, hang two portraits ...

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