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The writings of Seneca show how the model Stoic, relying on nothing but his own mind, can still be a loving family man. 

Despite a total lack of evidence, the belief that grains of wheat found in Ancient Egyptian tombs could produce bountiful crops was surprisingly hardy. 

The War Office’s map of cultural treasures in Rome, 1942.

Crisis-ridden Pakistan is a very different country from the one envisioned by its founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah in 1947. 

The cult of saints affected everyone in medieval Europe. A voracious souvenir market was one of its consequences.  

The idea that the ancients believed in Antipodean lands to balance  the globe is a modern invention – and wrong. 

In his lifetime George Downing was regarded as ‘ready to turn to every side that was uppermost’, but even Pepys was grudgingly forced to admit his qualities in eighteenth-century political life.

A magisterial translation of a work that forms the basis of the European civil law tradition.

During the Enlightenment, Alexander the Great was reinvented as an esoteric ideal.

The story of the transportation of three obelisks to London, Paris and New York captures the 19th-century mania for all things Egyptian.