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During a period of European peace, Spain sought to establish control of the Mediterranean. Yet a disastrous attempt to oust the Ottomans from North Africa threatened to accelerate the westward advance of Islam. 

Foreign traders were attracted to the City of London by England’s prosperous trade in wool and cloth. They were not always made welcome. 

A Danish-German survey sought to unearth the roots of the Hebrew Bible in Arabia. It became the first to comprehend a new Islamic ideology, which now threatens the West.

Is it ahistorical for public figures to say sorry for events that took place before they were born? The issue cuts to the heart of the relationship between the living and the dead.

In newly independent Indonesia, nationalism, communism and Islam competed for the attention of the people. But the country’s greatest novelist saw humanity behind the ideologies. 

Sevastopol, Russia’s principal warm-water naval base on the Black Sea, was not immune to the spread of revolutionary sentiment in 1917.

English women who travelled to the new colony of Jamestown for marriage were neither groomed nor coerced. The same cannot be said of their African counterparts. 

Tensions in the early 20th century resulted in the Second Exodus of the Jews from Egypt. Although many left or converted, a great many more remain, either forgotten or hiding.

In commissioning her biography, Emma, wife to two kings of England, created a subtle yet audacious piece of propaganda, used to maintain her position and secure her reputation.

One of the 20th-century’s most enduring artworks warns us against the danger of ‘alternative facts’.