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 ...

The royal pair were not well matched. Edward was tall and handsome, but his father was a hard act to follow and he was criticised for being cowardly, light-minded, extravagant, too much given to ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 ...

When the Prophet Muhammad died in Medina in the year 632 of the Christian Era, he was the most powerful figure in Arabia. His closest male relative was his cousin Ali ibn Abu Talib, the son of ...

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