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, ...

When Abbot Abbo of Fleury agreed to travel to Gascony to advise on the reform of the monastery of La Réole, he would not have expected that his trip would result in his death. Yet in 1004 Abbo was the ...

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 ...

In May 1756, an elderly governess died in the household of the Duke and Duchess of Portland, and was quickly and quietly buried in the churchyard of St Margaret’s, Westminster. Elizabeth Elstob left ...

In its first two centuries of existence Christianity witnessed the persecution of many of its members by officials of the Roman Empire; the causes of these persecutions have been and continue to be ...

A rather unusual petition from October 1716 is tucked away in the pope’s diocesan archives in the basilica of San Giovanni in Rome: Antonio Piervenanzi, parish priest of San Benedetto in Piscinola, ...

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 ...

Despite the obvious interest aroused by battle, murder and sudden death, the Wars of the Roses have been astonishingly neglected by modern historians, and even by the more recent historical novelists.

The ordinary people who made up most of the population of Stuart England—labouring people and out-servants, cottagers, paupers and vagabonds, common seamen and soldiers, according to the categories of ...

Tsar Alexander II oversaw a set of reforms which held out the prospect of modernising Russia but whose failure paved the way for revolution. Alexander II’s ‘great reforms’ stand out as among the most ...