T he sums are eye-watering. In 991 the English king Æthelred paid the Vikings £10,000 to stop them sacking the east coast of ...

Who Really Wrote the Bible: The Story of the Scribes by William M. Schniedewind asks what authorship meant to the hidden ...

Robert Clive’s death has long been attributed to suicide. What is the evidence?

In late 1945 and 1946 reporters from around the world were accommodated at a peculiar-looking castle in the Franconian town of Stein. It was an appropriate setting. The castle belonged to a dynasty of ...

In the late 70s AD Marcus Cerrinius Vatia ran for the lower magisterial office of aedile in the ancient city of Pompeii. More than 80 inscriptions, painted on the walls of the city’s buildings, record ...

In four hundred years, though a Dunwich may disappear into the sea and the coastline may recede from Rye, the climate and contours of a country, except where human beings have deliberately taken a ...

Stratford canning was the most famous British Ambassador of the nineteenth century. Created Viscount Stratford de Redcliffe in 1852, he was the first professional diplomat to be honoured after his ...

In the century after the establishment of Burma’s last dynasty, by King Alaungpaya in 1752, the fortunes of the kingdom declined from its peak of imperial might. When it seemed reasonable to expect ...

Bagehot, writing in the 1850s, once declared that the world of the Six Acts (legislation aimed at limiting meetings of radicals) seemed so far removed from his countrymen that they could not ...

In April 1605 the Court of Star Chamber – the Privy Council sitting in its judicial capacity – heard a curious case. As in all cases tried in this prerogative court, evidence was produced by means of ...

In November 1954 the East German author Max Zimmering travelled from the GDR to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). His route was arduous. From East Berlin he flew to Warsaw, then on to ...

T oothbrushing has been a regular part of most people’s daily routines since the mid-20th century, but it was only a few ...