The Merovingians have a reputation for long hair and barbarity. Instead, the dynasty, born out of the chaos of civil war, was ...

Zaga Christ died on 22 April 1638 leaving Europe no wiser as to the authenticity of the self-proclaimed Ethiopian prince who ...

The Roman Empire had two main populations: gods and humans. By its end, there was only one god left. How, and why, did he ...

Epic of the Earth: Reading Homer’s Iliad in the Fight for a Dying World by Edith Hall sees the signs of environmental ...

Teodoro Castro or Iosif Grigulevich? Costa Rica’s ambassador to Yugoslavia was a Soviet spy sent to kill Tito. O n the ...

Renaissance Florence had a problem: it wanted female sex workers, but it also needed to offer them a way out. The solution was a new brothel district – and a nunnery for former prostitutes ...

The death-knell of the Chartist movement in Britain sounded on what was meant to be its day of triumph. In a year when thrones tottered and regimes quailed as revolutions broke out all over Europe, ...

Why are you a historian of science? I read physics, but the history of science is more fun: you have to get the facts right, but you decide how to interpret them. The first demonstrations of ...

The Kings and Queens: An Irreverent Cartoon History of the British Monarchy by Kenneth Baker (Thames and Hudson 192 pp.) The Age of Caricature: Satirical Prints in the Reign of George III by Diana ...

The television series 1864, directed by Ole Bornedal and based on books by historian Tom Buk-Swienty, has followed The Killing and Borgen in becoming a successful Danish export. But 1864 is neither ...