The Russians were among the first Europeans to sense California's potential. Had they not sold their settlement there in 1841 ...

T he sky in the northern hemisphere had been darkened, the winters unusually harsh, and the summers barely arriving for decades when the German Lutheran author Johann Arndt published his Four Books on ...

The vagaries of palace politics are notoriously difficult to record. Historians should pay attention to rumour.

The 20th century’s most famous apostle of non-violence himself met a violent end. Mohandas Mahatma (‘the great soul’) Gandhi, who had taken a leading role in spearheading the campaign for independence ...

Man-Devil: The Mind and Times of Bernard Mandeville, the Wickedest Man in Europe by John J. Callanan revels in the making of ...

T he question of how history judges prime ministers can be answered in one word: haphazardly. This is because, of course, ...

Alexander Lee is a fellow in the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at the University of Warwick. His latest book is ...

It is, however, actually a sampler from Barbados – the earliest known Barbadian sampler in any collection. The RSN sampler is ...

In 1981, a horrific murder case required police in East Germany to go door-to-door collecting handwriting samples. There was ...

British soldiers fighting in the American Revolutionary War were unprepared for the terrain awaiting them across the Atlantic ...

When Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev came to power as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) on 11 March 1985 drastic reforms were demanded if the faltering USSR was to ...

The Grammar of Angels: A Search for the Magical Powers of Language by Edward Wilson-Lee finds in Giovanni Pico della Mirandola a case for the Rennaissance as a triumph not of individuality, but of ...