A mid-Victorian competition to design new Government Offices in Whitehall fell victim to a battle between the competing styles of Gothic and Classical. The result proved unworthy of a nation then at its imperial zenith.
Though their appeal seems bizarre to the modern mind, relics and reliquaries reflected an entirely logical system of belief bound up in the medieval worldview, explains James Robinson, curator of a new exhibition at the British Museum.
Taylor Downing offers a tribute to the military historian who was a television natural.
Though superb works of art in themselves, the wildlife paintings of Francis Barlow are full of rich metaphors that shed light on the anxieties and concerns of a Britain emerging from the horrors of civil war, says Nathan Flis.
The death of Stalin in 1953 marked a shift in the Soviet Union. Robert Hornsby discusses the underground groups that mushroomed in the aftermath and how the state responded to them.
The 50th anniversary of the trial and execution of the Final Solution’s master bureaucrat has inspired a number of books, exhibitions and films. How to they contribute to our understanding?
Colonel Nasser became president of Egypt in 1956. In this article from our 1981 archive, Robert Stephens considers how he has been both acclaimed as a nationalist liberator and condemned as a warmonger. What was his influence on the history of the twentieth century?
For much of the British Civil Wars the colony of Barbados remained neutral, allowing both Parliamentarian and Royalist exiles to run their plantations and trade side by side. But with the collapse of the king’s cause in the late 1640s matters took a violent turn, as Matthew Parker relates.
What became of the baby daughter of Henry VIII's widow Katherine Parr and her disgraced fourth husband Thomas Seymour after their deaths? Linda Porter unravels a Tudor mystery.
It is a deeply unfashionable thing to ask, says Tim Stanley, but might a nation's history be affected by the character of its people?
