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 ...

On 16 January 1926, the BBC broke the news that a murderous mob was storming the capital. Broadcasting the Barricades wasn’t ...

The first year of Edward I’s reign saw waves of strictures placed on a Jewish community in an already perilous situation. It ...