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

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

Samplers, pieces of embroidery made to practise or demonstrate needlework stitches, were an important part of girls’ education for centuries. In Britain, girls stitched samplers from the 17th to the ...

Except for aliens, there are more conspiracy theories about history than anything else. There are people who believe that Shakespeare’s plays were really by the Earl of Oxford, that JFK was ...

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 ...

The 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 last act of which the composer of Aida and Don Carlos, Rigoletto and Otello seems to have been conscious was buttoning up his waistcoat. Giuseppe Verdi spent his last Christmas and saw in his last ...

Written into history as the ‘Mad Duchess’ of Albemarle, what brought about the downfall of Elizabeth Cavendish?

In 1981, a horrific murder case required police in East Germany to go door-to-door collecting handwriting samples. There was no public outrage, because they were not told about the crime.