Britain

What sits beneath the planet’s crust? Scientists, writers, and conspiracy theorists have all had a guess, with Hollow-Earth Theory providing surprisingly resilient.

The wartime government’s programme of deliberate smoke production was an attempt to protect Britain from the Luftwaffe; for the National Smoke Abatement Society, the decision was a disaster.

On 16 October 1930 Britain’s sense of its historical greatness was skewered with the release of 1066 and All That.

The Indefatigable Asa Briggs: A Biography by Adam Sisman is a detailed portrait of that voluminous chronicler of Victorian things.

In the 1970s and 1980s Wimpy faced off with McDonald’s in a battle over what it meant to eat British.

For the Victorians and Edwardians, the late British summer was a time of sun, sand – and sea serpents.

Court-martialled in absentia on 2 August 1940, the Vichy regime confiscated de Gaulle’s property and condemned him to death. 

In 1903 a group of politicians tried to sell tariffs as a panacea to all of Britain’s problems. Would the public buy it?

Hertha Ayrton’s experiment in a bathtub may have saved lives in the trenches, but it caused ripples among the ranks of the Royal Society.