The vagaries of palace politics are notoriously difficult to record. Historians should pay attention to rumour. D onald Trump ...

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

On 2 August 1274 Edward, the eldest son of Henry III, returned to England from the Crusades. He had been gone for four long years and much had happened in his absence. Most obviously, his father had ...

Rosemary Wakeman’s The Worlds of Victor Sassoon: Bombay, London, Shanghai, 1918-1941 is a tale of three cities linked by ...

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

The discovery of America should have given the Spanish economy a giant boost, but in 1503, three years before the death of Christopher Columbus, the city of Seville in Castile was awarded the ...

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

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

The coronation of the first Elizabeth is of considerable interest to us and of greater historical importance than most. Not only was it the last occasion on which the Latin service was used, as ...

The Grammar of Angels: A Search for the Magical Powers of Language by Edward Wilson-Lee finds in Giovanni Pico della ...

In 1861 serfdom, the system which tied the Russian peasants irrevocably to their landlords, was abolished at the Tsar’s imperial command. Four years later, slavery in the USA was similarly declared ...