Glittering monument to Britain’s colonial achievement or fragile symbol of a fragmenting imperial dream? Jan Piggott charts the efforts to make Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace flourish as an ‘Acropolis of Empire’.
Michael Bloch tells the story of one of the more unusual dynasties related to the Windsors.
The quest for spiritual virtue through personal austerity drove many Eastern Christians to lead solitary lives as hermits surviving in the wilderness. Andrew Jotischky describes how indifference to food became an integral part of the monastic ideal in the Byzantine era, one revived in the West in the 11th and 12th centuries.
Modern day obituaries often speak of illnesses ‘bravely fought’, but the history of pain, a defining and constant experience in lives throughout history, lacks a substantial literature, argues Joanna Bourke.
Since its discovery in Yemen in 1972 a collection of brittle documents, believed to be among the earliest Koranic texts, has been the subject of fierce and divisive debate among scholars of Islamic history, as Scott MacMillan reports.
The capture of the Holy City by the forces of the First Crusade was a victory against the odds, but its legacy has borne bitter fruit.
Roger Moorhouse revisits a perceptive article by John Erickson on the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, first published in History Today in 2001, its insights born of a brief period of Russian openness.
Though it is immersed in the theological ideas of the Middle Ages, the cosmology of Dante’s Divine Comedy is sophisticated, sceptical and tolerant, argues James Burge.
As China reclaims its central role in the world, Robert Bickers appeals to Britons and others in the West to take account of the legacy left by the country’s difficult 19th century.
Berlusconi is a product of the country's incomplete unification, argues Alexander Lee.
