In listening to the war’s loudest voices, Crimean Quagmire: Tolstoy, Russell and the Birth of Modern Warfare by Gregory ...

The Catholic Church’s ban on wigs in the 18th century was as revealing of attitudes towards disability as vanity and sanctity ...

Like Lalande, many writers argued by analogy, a rhetorical technique that then punched considerable weight. Fuelled by ...

The Iron Duke said that of all his battles Assaye was ‘the bloodiest for the numbers that I ever saw’. It was fought against the Mahrattas, a formidable Hindu confederacy of warriors and marauders who ...

The seventh-century prince Mahendravarman Pallava and his cousin Vajrabodhi, the Indian tantric Buddhist answer to Merlin. Hindi, Urdu, French, Italian and a little Persian and Arabic. I am ashamed to ...

Who should claim Scotland’s royal jewels? After the forced abdication of Mary, Queen of Scots, the answer was not clear cut.

In 1874 a choir of African American singers concluded a successful tour of Britain, singing songs that confronted American ...

What happened to the French airmen in the Second World War who bombed France to help liberate it? D uring the Second World ...

Uzbekistan was a product of Islamic modernism and Soviet might. Free from the latter, the nation now seeks to foreground the ...

The French Resistance sought liberation above all else. But what should the postwar nation look like? The question was as old ...

It is more than 65 years since Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean fled from the latter’s home in Kent to the Soviet Union on Friday 25th May, 1951, but the story of the Cambridge Spies continues to ...

To the Ottomans, who took it in the 15th century, it was ‘infidel Smyrna’, the last Christian majority city in Asia. There ...