The dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 forced the Japanese government into unconditional surrender and the country, which was in a state of collapse, was occupied by ...

Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria was a Georgian, like Stalin, who called him ‘my Himmler’. Involved in revolutionary activities from his teens and head of the secret police in Georgia in his twenties, he ...

Caught between the antagonistic states of India and Pakistan, Kashmir is stuck in geopolitical limbo. Its location – and its ...

Chevaliere d’Eon or Chevalier d’Eon? An 18th-century legal dispute between two French spies unravelled into a public battle ...

A new book for the new year is an old British custom, but an old book can be even better.

There were three large pictures of George III at the exhibition of Royal Portraits arranged by the Academy of Arts in the Spring of 1953. Looking-at the first, by Reynolds, painted when the King was ...

Prague, under the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, became the centre of the Renaissance world, where cultures mixed and learning ...

On 10 December 1948, after months of negotiation led by Eleanor Roosevelt, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was ...

The remarkable fall of absinthe: from 19th-century ‘Green Fairy’ to scourge of society.

Suffragette sets out to tell the story of the ‘footsoldiers’ of the women’s suffrage movement. Director Sarah Gavon and writer Abi Morgan have therefore made the refreshing decision to avoid a more ...

The anatomical theatre in the Archiginnasio of Bologna is one of the city’s most intriguing tourist attractions. For three euros, tourists can visit the anatomical theatre and the former university, ...

So when Raúl Castro called for an end to the embargo based on economic and humanitarian grounds in late December, he was ...