On 13 February 1692 the Macdonalds of Glencoe were put to the sword by troops loyal to William III. Nobody was held to ...

N o premodern poet praised coffee with greater passion than the North African jurist-poet Abu al-Fath al-Tunisi (d.1576). As ...

Rather than a catalogue of a fanciful past, Folklore: A Journey Through the Past and Present by Owen Davies and Ceri ...

a Curiosity to taste the Juice, or Matter contain’d in one of the little Cystis’s or Glands of the same, which he did by ...

A Concise History breaks off these later accretions and unearths their long history. Runes’ primary function as an alphabetic writing system is underlined throughout, as part of the ‘uphill battle’ ...

The annexation of Cyprus was more than another milestone in Roman expansion – it was a showcase of political theatre. In the ...

Hard Streets: Working-Class Lives in Charlie Chaplin’s London by Jacqueline Riding goes where few historians dare: south of ...

Unreason reigned supreme in Zurich on 5 February 1916 as Dada made its debut at the Cabaret Voltaire. B y February 1916 Lenin was staying in a shabby quarter of Zurich. He lived next to a butcher’s on ...

There is a story that suggests Joseph Stalin hated Hamlet. Shakespeare’s story of bloody intrigue in the court of Denmark supposedly reminded Stalin of Kremlin politics – and could not criticism of ...

Anticipating the events of thirty-six years later, the Japanese launched a sudden, surprise attack on the Russian naval base of Port Arthur on the coast of Manchuria without the formality of declaring ...

British servicemen overseas bought sex, sometimes in brothels run by the British army. In the 1970s they began to talk about it. Finished by the First World War and buried under the nation states that ...

Albert Speer’s plan to transform Berlin into the capital of a 1,000-year Reich would have created a vast monument to misanthropy. In 1937 Hitler’s architect Albert Speer was given the task of ...