Like Lalande, many writers argued by analogy, a rhetorical technique that then punched considerable weight. Fuelled by ...

To the Ottomans, who took it in the 15th century, it was ‘infidel Smyrna’, the last Christian majority city in Asia. There ...

The Catholic Church’s ban on wigs in the 18th century was as revealing of attitudes towards disability as vanity and sanctity ...

Who should claim Scotland’s royal jewels? After the forced abdication of Mary, Queen of Scots, the answer was not clear cut.

What happened to the French airmen in the Second World War who bombed France to help liberate it? D uring the Second World ...

Uzbekistan was a product of Islamic modernism and Soviet might. Free from the latter, the nation now seeks to foreground the ...

The French Resistance sought liberation above all else. But what should the postwar nation look like? The question was as old ...

In 1874 a choir of African American singers concluded a successful tour of Britain, singing songs that confronted American ...

Tyrant and usurper: the last wills of Richard II and Henry IV give rare insight into the medieval monarchs who wore the crown ...

Would Mary Shelley have conceived of her novel of 1818, Frankenstein, without the work of the Italian scientist Luigi Galvani? Looking back at its creation, she recalled long conversations with Lord ...

Elected president of Argentina in 1946, Juan Perón was re-elected in 1952. The origins of his fall have been traced back to the premature death that year of his wife, the glamorous Evita, of cancer in ...

Mayer Amschel Rothschild was born in the Jewish quarter of Frankfurt am Main in Germany in the 1740s. His ancestors had been in the city for at least two centuries and their surname came from the ...