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?

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

Lost Countries of South America, Laurence Blair makes the case for the region. Blair, a British journalist living in Paraguay, tells the stories of nine South American ‘nations’ that either broke up, ...

Donald Trump has often been likened to Aaron Burr, described as ‘one of the most unprincipled men in the United States’. His isolationism, however, owes more to Thomas Jefferson.

When the Japanese surrendered in 1945, the East Indies nationalists seized the opportunity to throw off the colonial yoke of the Dutch and proclaim the independent state of Indonesia which the ...

In the first of a new series, we ask historians one of the burning questions of the day.

The world is small nowadays and the acclaim that once greeted those who had accomplished great journeys of exploration is now reserved for the voyagers in outer space. It was different in the ...

During the Cold War, 224 nuclear weapons were denotated at Novaya Zemlya in the Soviet Union’s remote Arctic north. Only with the collapse of the USSR in 1989 did the true scale become known.

Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife: The Extraordinary Lives of Medieval Women and God’s Own Gentlewoman bring the real world of medieval women out of the margins. Margery Kempe gave up her duties as a wife and ...