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 ...

The life of one of the leading British historians of the mid-20th century. ‘Edmund Burke and the Invention of Modern Conservatism, 1830-1914’ review The winner of the 2018 Longman-History Today Book ...

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?

Toothbrushing has been a regular part of most people’s daily routines since the mid-20th century, but it was only a few decades earlier that the British state first began to impress upon the public ...

Tasked with stemming a growing wave of duels, Montevideo Police Chief Virgilio Sampognaro spared no effort in putting officers on the tail of men he identified as potential duellists or seconds in the ...

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 ...

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 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 ...

Thanks to Joseph Goebbels, the film director Georg Wilhelm Pabst luxuriated in a massive budget for the dramatised documentary he shot in occupied Prague during the autumn of 1942. Commissioned to ...