The acute housing crisis of mid-Victorian Britain generated stormy opinions about the nature of state intervention and the ...

On 1 October 1868, King Mongkut – who reigned as Rama IV – passed away having trod a delicate course to keep Thailand free of ...

On 27 September 1130, a Norman usurper gained a crown from a desperate pope and the Kingdom of Sicily was born.

American democracy has been haunted by the spectre of a Caesar-type figure since the birth of the republic. Have such fears ...

In listening to the war’s loudest voices, Crimean Quagmire: Tolstoy, Russell and the Birth of Modern Warfare by Gregory ...

The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham by Lucy Hughes-Hallett picks through the fragments of ...

Uzbekistan was a product of Islamic modernism and Soviet might. Free from the latter, the nation now seeks to foreground the ...

The seventh-century prince Mahendravarman Pallava and his cousin Vajrabodhi, the Indian tantric Buddhist answer to Merlin. Hindi, Urdu, French, Italian and a little Persian and Arabic. I am ashamed to ...

For millennia everybody knew that human beings enjoy a privileged, unique position at the centre of the universe. That self-confidence began to crack after Nicolaus Copernicus suggested that the Earth ...

Hitler had previously started rearming Germany in defiance of the Treaty of Versailles, reoccupied the Rhineland in 1936 and annexed Austria in 1938. He was now determined to seize the Sudetenland, ...

One night in 1926 the composer George Gershwin picked a book called Porgy to read in bed and was so rivetted by it that he could not stop until he had read it all. He then wrote to the author at four ...