Recently published

Historical novelist Katie Grant delves into her family history for inspiration.

What did it mean to be an earl, and where did the title come from? Marc Morris looks at the relationship between the Norman and Plantagenet kings and their earls.

Mark Bryant contines his exploration of significant cartoons and caricature with a look at a German magazine that published some of the bravest satirical critiques of Hitler, bitterly attacking Nazism until 1933, and still published to the last years of the war.

Merchant Ivory’s latest film White Countess tells the story of a high-born Russian woman reduced to poverty and prostitution to support her family – refugees of the Bolshevik Revolution – in a Shanghai slum. Fraser Newham investigates the experience of the real White Russians of Shanghai and discovers this scenario to be close to the truth for many exiled Russian women.

Much has been written about Guy Fawkes, but less well-known are the two figures who apprehended him in Parliament's cellars.

John Julius Norwich has an infectious enthusiasm in his writing that makes his books hugely popular. Here he explains why certain subjects have allured him, such as the exotic world of medieval Sicily and his adored Venice, while others leave him cold.

The organisation which would become the political arm of the Irish Republican Army was founded as a nationalist pressure group on November 28th, 1905.

The future Queen of France was born on November 2nd, 1755

David Livingstone reached the Victoria Falls on November 17th, 1855.

Cartoon historian Mark Bryant examines significant cartoons and caricatures from the history of the genre, in Britain and overseas and from the 18th century until 1945, and tells the fascinating  stories behind them.