Volume: 57 Issue: 1

On January 5th, 1757, Robert-Francois Damiens attempted to assassinate Louis XV.

Charlotte Crow reports a recent debate between historians and programme makers on the state of history on the small screen, and a television success in that field....

Ben Reiss looks at the background to Manet’s extraordinary series of paintings of the demise of a Mexican emperor, now on display at MOMA, New York, and described in...

For some time now, ‘2007’ has been short-hand in some quarters for the bicentenary of the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1807, an anniversary that is...

Robert Bud says we should remember the Asian flu epidemic of 1957 as a turning point in the history of antibiotics.

Charles Freeman visits the Eternal City, and finds the Castel Sant’Angelo, home to emperors and popes, to be the clue to unravelling its fabulously rich and...

Debbi Codling looks at the beliefs and spiritual life of the man who usurped Richard II, an anointed king.

Fraser Newham finds a connection running from the East India Company’s first mission to Tibet to the completion of the Golmud to Lhasa railway by the Chinese today...

David Loades looks at the man who was king of England in his youth, and her bitter enemy thirty years later.

Pat Wagstaff looks at the history of a famous jewel that is reputed to have an association with Mary I, and is now in the possession of Elizabeth Taylor.

The postbag from our readers at the start of a new year.

Jörg Friedrich’s horrifying account of the Allied bombing raids caused a stir on its first publication in Germany. Now it has been translated into English, and...

Henry Tudor was born on January 28th, 1457, with a claim to the English crown which was extremely slight and intriguingly complicated.

In the first of a number of articles marking the bicentenary of the bill of March 1807 to abolish the slave trade, Rosie Llewellyn-Jones tells the remarkable story...

Richard Cust introduces a new website with details of a wide-ranging court of Charles I’s reign.

Tony Rothman recalls one of the turning points of early modern history, when a heroic defence prevented the rampant Ottoman forces from gaining a strategic...

Martin Evans talks to historian, biographer and novelist Peter Ackroyd.

The Agadir Crisis of 1911 was one of a number of incidents that raised international tensions in the years before 1914. Nigel Falls describes the European powers’...

Cartoon historian Mark Bryant looks at the origins of the satirical magazine that has attracted a generation of outstanding cartoonists.