Feature

Pirates captured by an increasingly powerful British state were routinely executed. But what happened to the families they left behind?

The chance survival of a ‘postbag’ of letters reveals a lost world of merchants, pilgrims, bankers and scholars.

‘Word blindness’ was a recognised condition more than a century ago. But it was not until the 1970s that it began to be accepted by the medical establishment.

Gerald Brooke’s time in a Soviet prison was a pivotal moment in Cold War espionage.

Lucie Delarue-Mardrus was at the heart of daring interwar Paris, where she used her influence to defend those left behind by ‘progress’.

The grand funeral of Anne of Cleves, the neglected fourth queen of Henry VIII, took place during the reign of Mary Tudor, when English Catholicism was resurgent.

Fiercely independent, highly skilled sailors, the Kroomen of Sierra Leone forged an alliance with the Royal Navy to rid the African coasts of slavers.

Despite popular misconceptions and its aristocratic origins, for part of its history opera was inextricably linked with popular culture – no more so than in the 1920s. 

Crisis-ridden Pakistan is a very different country from the one envisioned by its founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah in 1947. 

In his lifetime George Downing was regarded as ‘ready to turn to every side that was uppermost’, but even Pepys was grudgingly forced to admit his qualities in eighteenth-century political life.