One bright July morning in 1849 the streets of Venice were crowded with people celebrating the Festa of the Madonna della Salute. Although the Republic was at war, and the city actually under siege by ...

Peasants and popes, free speech and fashion, sentimentality and special forces: the first 10 of 20 historians choose their ...

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

The original Crystal Palace was the centrepiece of the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London. Built in what is now Kensington Gardens, it was an astonishing prefabricated construction, created on ...

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 ...

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

In 1861 serfdom, the system which tied the Russian peasants irrevocably to their landlords, was abolished at the Tsar’s imperial command. Four years later, slavery in the USA was similarly declared ...

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

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

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

The New York Times, as it so often does, described the scene perfectly: The brokers stood perfectly thunderstruck for a moment, and then there was a general run to notify the different houses of Wall ...