What makes someone a king? More importantly, what unmakes a king? Henry II’s experiment in co-kingship saw one Henry III fall ...

The Grammar of Angels: A Search for the Magical Powers of Language by Edward Wilson-Lee finds in Giovanni Pico della ...

The concerns of daily life prompted early modern people to seek reassurance in fate, stars, and astrologers.

The English Puritans in 1603 had high hopes that the new Scottish king, James I, would push the Church of England nearer to Calvinism. As he rode south to London, James was presented with the ...

In 1861 serfdom, the system which tied the Russian peasants irrevocably to their landlords, was abolished at the Tsar’s imperial command. Four years later, slavery in the USA was similarly declared ...

The East African groundnuts scheme was postwar Britain’s equivalent of the Millennium Dome. In pursuit of a laudable objective, millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money was poured diligently into a sump ...

In 1950 the Federal Assembly of Yugoslavia unanimously resolved that the withering away of the state should begin immediately. The Yugoslav dictator, Marshal Tito, may have been amused. He had an ...

Defeated in the First World War, humiliated, desperately short of food and assailed by the influenza epidemic that swept Europe, Germany was in a critical state. The Kaiser abdicated as emperor and on ...

The election result astounded winners and losers alike. In 1900, the Conservatives and Unionists had won 402 seats on the strength of success in the Boer War. The Liberals had 184 seats, with 82 Irish ...

Long before Louis Braille’s time, attempts had been made to create embossed letters or shapes on wood or paper to enable the blind to read by touch. After the Napoleonic Wars, a French artillery ...