The Second World War disrupted narratives of mankind’s ‘progress’, but – as William Golding captured so vividly in Lord of the Flies – human history has always been a balancing act between enlightenment and calamity.
The English saint Oswald of Northumbria proved incredibly popular in the medieval German-speaking world. How did he get there?
It may not have been the first, argues John Hardiman in The French Revolution: A Political History, but it was the first of its kind.
During the Cold War successive British governments did all they could to maintain a friendship with Tito’s Yugoslavia. Why was the communist strongman so important to Westminster?
In early modern England the time and date was often an informal matter, which had the potential to pose problems.
‘Which moment would I most like to go back to? Just before the Big Bang. I realise there are risks attached.’
After a long battle, Britain’s Sex Discrimination Act came into force in 1975. What did it do for women?
A Popular History of Idi Amin’s Uganda by Derek R. Peterson looks for the ordinary people who kept the regime’s wheels turning.
Finished by the First World War and buried under the nation states that succeeded it, the Habsburg monarchy had survived for centuries despite its obvious faultlines. What held it together?
As the father of descriptive geography, Strabo of Amasia provides a unique view of the early Roman Empire.
