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Interrail gave young Europeans the freedom of the continent in the 1970s. Five decades on, people are still taking the train.

Britain’s dearth of Afghan informants provided an opportunity for a disinherited Indian prince and his son to present themselves as an authentic conduit to the Muslim world. Soon they were advising the nation on subjects from geopolitics to the powers of the occult.

Was the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974 inevitable?

The Literary and Philosophical Society was once ubiquitous, allowing minds to meet and views to collide. Their disappearance has left more questions than answers.

Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic by Tabitha Stanmore gives a human face to magic in medieval and early modern England.

At the outset of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference Japan enjoyed a seat at the top table, but the vexed issue of racial equality set it and its notional Western allies on different paths.

The Paris Olympics of 1900 celebrated not just sporting excellence, but France’s might.

For nine days Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess was the greatest box office phenomenon of the English Renaissance. Then a warrant was issued for his arrest.

‘The most important lesson history has taught me? Destroy your drafts and personal papers, because one day a graduate student will comb through them looking for incriminating titbits.’

A community of Ethiopian monk-scholars in Renaissance Rome brought their learning, language and liturgy into the heart of the Roman Church.