At the height of the Roman Empire, hundreds of merchant ships left Egypt every year to voyage through the Red Sea into the Indian Ocean, exchanging the produce of the Mediterranean for exotic eastern commodities. Raoul McLaughlin traces their pioneering journeys.
The ‘Milan Kundera affair’, in which the eponymous Czech novelist was recently accused of denouncing a ‘spy’ to the security services in 1950, illustrates how the Communist past has become a battlefield for Czech historians of different generations, writes Aviezer Tucker.
S.M. Toyne charts the inception and development of this most quintessentially English sport.
A project to restore one of the Polish city’s 20th-century monuments has turned into a cultural battleground, writes Roger Moorhouse.
Wilkie Collins’ haunting mystery of false identity and female instability reflected one of the lunacy panics of the age. Sarah Wise looks at three events that inspired The Woman in White.
Richard Cavendish describes the attack, on August 24th 410, that signalled the beginning of the end of the Western Roman empire
Richard Cavendish remembers the death of an ill-fated medieval Scottish king, on August 3rd 1460.
During the Anglo-French conflicts that characterised the 14th century, the Oxford theologian John Wyclif challenged the ‘un-Christian’ pursuit of war and wealth. Yet, just like anti-war protesters today, Wyclif had little influence on Parliament or the king, writes Rory Cox.
Rosie Llewellyn-Jones recalls the Victorian economist who helped resolve the financial crisis in India after the Mutiny of 1857.
Richard Cavendish remembers Henry Hudson's attempted discovery of the Northwest Passage.
