The Price of Victory: A Naval History of Britain: 1815-1945 by N.A.M. Rodger looks above decks for the story of the modern ...

Political reputations are forged by actions, but the long view of history can be hard to predict. The End of Britain’s Weeks-Long General Elections General elections in Britain were once weeks-long ...

In Augustus the Strong: A Study in Artistic Greatness and Political Fiasco, Tim Blanning restores the ‘incorrigible Saxon’ to ...

Samplers, pieces of embroidery made to practise or demonstrate needlework stitches, were an important part of girls’ education for centuries. In Britain, girls stitched samplers from the 17th to the ...

Except for aliens, there are more conspiracy theories about history than anything else. There are people who believe that Shakespeare’s plays were really by the Earl of Oxford, that JFK was ...

The Grammar of Angels: A Search for the Magical Powers of Language by Edward Wilson-Lee finds in Giovanni Pico della Mirandola a case for the Rennaissance as a triumph not of individuality, but of ...

The sky in the northern hemisphere had been darkened, the winters unusually harsh, and the summers barely arriving for decades when the German Lutheran author Johann Arndt published his Four Books on ...

In 1981, a horrific murder case required police in East Germany to go door-to-door collecting handwriting samples. There was no public outrage, because they were not told about the crime.

Individuals are not happy in proportion to the amount of space their persons occupy. Yet certain nations, at certain periods of their history, seem to take it for granted that the wider they spread ...

Donald Trump’s electoral comeback has provoked a lot of analysis from political scientists. Historians have been slower to engage with the subject. By temperament they are inclined to seek a longer ...

In September 1781, Thomas Hughes, then 22, visited Brighton for what he hoped would be a restorative holiday. It was not his first trip: such sojourns were common for Hughes. But on this occasion ...

Born in 1654 to the 2nd Duke and Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Elizabeth Cavendish was the eldest of six children. Granddaughter to both Civil War general William Cavendish and prominent MP William ...