[That] year Sigehelm and Athelstan took to Rome – and also to India to [the shrines of] St Thomas and St Bartholomew – the alms which King Alfred had vowed to send there when they besieged the raiding ...

During the Second World War, Berlin scientists discovered nuclear fission. Only one of them got the credit. Why was Lise ...

The idea that a battle might alter the course of history, though first popularised in the 19th century, is not without foundation. For as one writer remarked a generation after 1066, ‘French customs ...

Strikingly Similar: Plagiarism and Appropriation from Chaucer to Chatbots by Roger Kreuz finds that copyright isn’t always a ...

Mexico’s disgraced saviour General Antonio López de Santa Anna completed his comeback on 9 March 1839 as the Pastry War came to a close.

The Cancelled Prime Minister: The Extraordinary Rise and Tragic Fall of Ramsay MacDonald by Walter Reid finds the romance behind Labour’s great betrayer.

On Lady Day, 25 March, some 800 villagers were due to take part in the centuries-old annual custom of the Tichborne Dole, in which a gift of flour was distributed by the local landed family, the ...

We have a tendency to associate youth culture with modernity, but medieval people were as anxious about youths as are today’s headline writers worrying about the rise of the ‘millennial’. As the poet ...

As if fathering 95 children was not enough for one lifetime, Muhammad Ali was also the father of modern Egypt. A Muslim born in Macedonia, known alternatively as Mehmet Ali, he went to Egypt in 1801 ...

The man who made ‘Pavlov’s dogs’ famous the world over won the Nobel Prize for physiology in 1904. In his laboratory experiments with dogs he discovered what is generally called the conditioned reflex ...

Emperor Constantine the Great authorised Christianity across the Roman Empire in 313, but it was Theodosius I, half a century later, who put the brute force of the imperial state behind the faith.

The tsar was fifty-eight. He had held one-sixth of the earth’s surface in an iron grip for thirty years, after succeeding his brother Alexander I in 1825. Described by an American diplomat as ...