Feature

Today sacrifice is seen as a barbaric, pagan practice, but it was central to the formation of early Christian identity.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, as scholars first started to translate and study Old English, they struggled to reconcile England’s past with its present.

Eager to create goodwill towards Britain in its former colonies, the postwar government encouraged students from across the Empire to study in London. Housing them was a problem, as events in the summer of 1951 revealed.

Hoping to weaken the rebels’ cause, Britain offered freedom to enslaved people who joined the British army. At the end of the American Revolutionary War that promised freedom had to be honoured – but how and where?

That the United States declared its independence in July 1776 is well known; that the British state commissioned, but never published, a counter-declaration is not.

Forestry is a delicate balancing act between the needs of the present and those of the future. The French Revolution brought into question how France’s forests should be managed.

The British countryside of the 1930s was a happy hunting ground for the British Union of Fascists, where recruits sometimes came with titles and estates.

Pericles lends his name to an entire era of ancient Greek history, but we know little about him for certain. Statesman, demagogue, or Athenian original: who was he really?

In 1947, as independence loomed, Burma’s prime minister-in-waiting, Aung San, was assassinated. Was it his political rivals, the military, or the British?

The death of a pope presented a lucrative opportunity in Renaissance Italy. Fortunes could be made – but only if you could correctly guess the conclave’s chosen successor.