I n the archive of Carl Hagenbeck’s Tierpark (Animal Park), which opened in Hamburg in 1907, there is a remarkable photograph ...

Roundhead to Royalist, the Double Life of Cromwell’s Spy, Dennis Sewell asks whether George Downing was the ‘biggest ...

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

How to finance old age has been a problem since the inception of Britain’s welfare state. Why is pension reform so difficult?

The Decembrist revolt of 1825 saw Russia’s nobility attempt to depose tsar Nicholas I. Dismissed as romantic idealists, they ...

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

Throughout the greatest days of the Roman Empire, the famous Pax Romana was preserved with the help of an efficient police force. In the cities, small forces of gendarmes, often recruited from slaves, ...

Henry VIII’s break with Rome was a watershed moment for England and for Christendom. Did the papacy have itself to blame?

They go low, we go lower. The Rage of Party: How Whig Versus Tory Made Modern Britain by George Owers offers up the origins of Britain’s fractious political culture. What’s in a word? In 1965 the ...

Tim Black seeks to understand the origins of antisemitism, looking beyond the Holocaust to the ancient Middle East and medieval Europe. A scene from Auschwitz by Holocaust survivor Leo Haas, c. 1947.

A passage from book 12 of The Odyssey, in Emily Wilson’s acclaimed translation of Homer’s epic, sees the hero Odysseus, known in Latin as Ulysses, warn his men of an impending challenge: She [Circe] ...

The week-long hurricane that struck the south of England and the English Channel at the end of the month was beyond anything in living memory. John Evelyn described it in his diary as ‘not to be ...